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“The Much Wished-For Shore”: Nationalism and Utopianism in New Zealand Literature: 1817-1973.

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English in the University of Canterbury by Oliver B. Crawford Ellis

University of Canterbury 2013 2

CONTENTS CONTENTS...... 2 Acknowledgements...... 3 Abstract...... 4 Introduction...... 5 Chapter One: Early Utopian Speculation and the Establishment of a Tradition...... 20 Chapter Two: The Late Nineteenth-Century Response...... 47 Chapter Three: Revision and Redirection in the 1930s...... 77 Chapter Four: Post-War Anxiety and the Challenge to Pākehā Utopianism...... 108 Conclusion...... 126 Bibliography...... 133 3

Acknowledgements.

Thank you to Dr. Daniel Bedggood and Dr. Nicholas Wright for their indispensable

supervision and encouragement.

My gratitude also goes to Anna Halliday for enduring this project’s monopolisation of

my time. 4

Abstract.

This thesis examines the relationship between utopianism and nationalism in New Zealand literature between 1817 and 1973. My research utilises the definition of both the utopia and the nation as

“imagined” or “imaginary” communities (to use Benedict Anderson and Phillip Wegner’s terms), in demonstrating how they function as interdependent concepts in colonial New Zealand literature.

Specifically, my research focuses on how a dominant discourse of Pākehā nationalism is influenced by the desires of colonial settlement. There is an identifiable tradition in which New Zealand is imagined as a utopian space with an ambivalence towards modernity. The settler nation is defined subjectively by different authors, retaining, however, a tradition of excluding groups which are not compatible with the authors’ utopian projections. This exclusion may be based on race, gender, class, political views or other categorisations. I view this tradition as a dialectic of changing desires and utopian visions, based on changing historical contexts, but always engaged with the central attempt to speculate the possibilities that New Zealand holds as a utopia for Anglocentric settlement. The thesis is divided into four chapters, each based on the comparison of two texts from a certain period. The first chapter compares two texts of early nineteenth century British settlement,

J.L. Nicholas’ Narrative of Voyage to New Zealand (1817) and E.J. Wakefield’s Adventure in New

Zealand (1845). The second chapter examines Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and Julius Vogel’s

Anno Domini 2000 (1889). The third chapter focuses on Robin Hyde’s Wednesday’s Children (1936) and John Mulgan’s Man Alone (1939). My final chapter argues that the end of this mode of writing is signalled by Smith’s Dream (1971 rev. 1973) by C.K. Stead and Intensive Care (1970) by Janet

Frame, which demonstrate a changing approach to the tradition. After this point, other postcolonial voices emerge and the attempted homogeneity of settler utopianism is disrupted. 5 Introduction.

When Eric Hobsbawm writes that “the last two centuries of the human history of planet

Earth are incomprehensible without some understanding of the term ‘nation’” (Nations 1), it is clear that national identity constitutes a enormous part of human history during this period. The settler colonies such as New Zealand which made up the British Empire consciously attempted to develop national traditions and histories to give shape to their colonial identity. An examination of New

Zealand’s colonial literature reveals how important the process of settlement itself was to nationalist development. One of the most influential themes of this development was the idea that New

Zealand could act as a site for utopian settlement. It is this centrality of utopianism to colonial nationalism that is the focus of my research.

Lyman Tower Sargent writes “it is clear that settler colonies have produced a rich harvest of utopian literature and projects” because in many ways, “the whole process of colonial settlement can be seen as a type of utopianism” (Cambridge Comp. To Utopian Literature 202). This utopianism stems from the desire of settlers to find a better life in the colony, whether this is expressed in terms of religious freedom, material wealth, social mobility or any number of other desires. I will be looking at the ways the utopianism of settlement influences the period of writing it precedes, and examine the way that Pākehā nationalism developed under the influence of the “rich harvest” of colonial idealism.

The key concepts of my research are nationalism and utopianism, which often function as interdependent extensions of one another. This becomes especially acute in the New Zealand colonial context. Not only do settler ideals influence the development of a local national identity, but the importation of extant settler national identities influences initial visions of utopian settlement. It is necessary first however to understand the way that nationalism and utopianism 6 function as individual processes in order to understand their interaction in New Zealand colonialism.

Every settler coming from Europe to New Zealand brought with them their own national identity; I am focussing on the dominant nationalism of British immigrants. This national identity could be used to retain a sense of self and community upon arriving in the new world: “...the settler must retain some sense of the old-country self to be able to draw on a strong and authoritative identity” (Turner 21). How the nation defines itself, though, is entirely relative, relying on the presence of external nations and peoples with which to define the nation against. The particularities of one nation are measured by comparison to others; John Breuilly writes:

The idea of the ruled society which might only be definable in terms of its private character,

that is, in terms of its ‘culture’; of the sovereign territorial state; of a world made up of such

states in competition with one another – these are the essential premises upon which

nationalist ideology and nationalist politics build. (67)

Joane Nagel elaborates on this definition by suggesting that this relativity produces boundaries which exclude: nationalism consists of “the tasks of defining community, of setting boundaries and of articulating national character, history, and a vision for the future tend[ing] to emphasize both unity and ‘otherness’” (116). These tasks, especially “emphasising otherness” are essential to the imagining of the colonial nation. Thomas Eriksen writes that “the very idea of the nation presupposes that there are other nations, or at least other peoples, who are not members of the nation” (138).

The context of definition is important, because articulating national identity is a subjective rather than empirical exercise. Benedict Anderson’s definition stresses this aspect of nationalism, in that it is “an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and 7 sovereign” (6). Anderson’s definition demonstrates that the existence of any nation is a product of imagining, an ongoing process which defies static definition. Eric Hobsbawm emphasises the importance of this process when he writes that “for the purposes of analysis nationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round” (10). The nation does not exist independently of nationalism, allowing for national imagining can be utilised for various means:

...the criteria used for this purpose – language, ethnicity or whatever – are themselves fuzzy,

shifting and ambiguous, and as useless for purposes of the traveller’s orientation as cloud-

shapes are compared to landmarks. This, of course, makes them unusually convenient for

propagandist and programmatic, as distinct from descriptive purposes. (Hobsbawm 6)

This convenience of subjectivity means that nationalism can be employed as a tool for purposes beyond just description. Hence, in the colonial context, the “othering” of indigenous peoples becomes a way of asserting and maintaining settler autonomy against these groups. The agent of national imagining may have various reasons for defining national “otherness” though, utilising ideas not just of race, but of class, gender, wealth, politics, religion or any number of categories in order to define the nation along terms which are sympathetic to their concerns.

Utopianism is a primary concern for many writers attempting to define New Zealand in the colonial period. The utopia is also an imagined community, distinguishing “itself from other forms of the ideal society, and from other forms of social and political theory, by being in the first place a piece of fiction” (Kumar, Utopianism 20). This makes utopianism especially suitable to function as an extension of nationalism. In fact Phillip Wegner says that since Thomas More’s Utopia (1516),

“there has been a continuous exchange of energies between the imaginary communities of the narrative utopia and the imagined communities of the nation-state, the former providing one of the 8 first spaces for working out the particular shapes and boundaries of the latter” (xvi). This occurs particularly in colonialism where the future of the colonial nation is inextricably intertwined with the expectations and ideals of settlement. The motif of settlement is particularly apposite to utopianism, in that

In its simplest form, it refers to a better place, a place in which the problems that beset

our current condition are transcended or resolved. Yet it also means, or at any rate

suggests through a pun on the ancient Greek words for ‘no place’, a place imagined but

not realised. (Noble 12)

The potential of a new space is as close to a “no place” as perhaps is possible, and so the European discovery of New Zealand presented opportunities for imagining that transcended the boundaries of the familiar world. Louis Marin writes that “Utopia is the figure of the horizon” (412), indicating that utopia always exists on the horizon, at the limit of our imagination. Gregory Claeys also stresses the distance of utopia when he writes that, “it is a pole star, a guide, a reference point on a common map of an eternal quest for the improvement of the human condition” (11-15). Colonial idealism appropriates this approach and presents New Zealand as a “place apart”, an isolated space beyond the horizon, shielded from the problems of the world.

As with nationalism, the process of utopian imagining is based on boundaries and exclusion.

The utopia is a place that rejects the current state of society and attempts to demonstrate what from the present is desirable and what is not. This means utopias are always born out of circumstance and context, and function as a “telescope... to penetrate precisely the nearest nearness” (Bloch 43). Tom

Moylan writes: “It is, at heart, rooted in the unfulfilled needs and wants of specific classes, groups, and individuals in their unique historical contexts” (1). The construction of utopia is based on 9 projections of current ideals, with the exclusion of that which is not utopian being central to its imagining.

The agent of utopian projection in the colony must decide what is desirable about their existing situation that should be imported into the colony. The idealised nation is one of the most central aspects of this utopian projection. Terms such as “Brighter Britain” and “Better Britain” which were used in New Zealand suggest the improvement of an existing idea of Britain, but their very use necessitates definition. Colonial utopianism demands definitions of ideal nationalism, and this produces boundaries which exclude disruptive “others” from both the existing nation and the colonial community. The development of local nationalism is influenced by both the identity of the settling groups as well as their utopian projections, creating a loop which reinforces many of the ideas that accompany utopian settlement.

Nationalism, New World colonialism and utopianism are related to each other as products of modernity. Nationalism’s function as personal and public identification “shored up legitimacies which, in an age of capitalism, scepticism, and science, could less and less safely rest on putative sacrality and sheer antiquity” (Anderson 85). The nation originated as a response to the increasing uncertainty of older arrangements such as feudalism and monarchism. The capitalist fuelled expansion of Europe into the New World was made possible by the invention or discovery of the compass, gunpowder and the printing press. Capitalist competition between nations for resources, land and wealth initiated this colonisation.

Thomas More’s Utopia establishes the utopian genre’s relationship with modernity in its exploration of these ideas. Fatima Vieira writes that “the concept of utopia is no doubt an attribute of modern thought, and one of its most visible consequences” (5). For example, Utopia depicts a community organised as a nation, with a common identity that defines it against other nations.

Utopia’s location as an island in the New World signals how European imperialism influenced the 10 speculation of new possibilities for national organisation. These two factors, of organisation and geography show how reason and science influenced More to write a (however satirical) text based in the physical world, rather than magical ideas of paradise and Cockaigne, or religious millennial promises.

More’s text is not a mere celebration of modernity though, but is in fact defined by its ambivalence towards modern developments. For example, the influence of capitalist-driven enclosure in More’s England is what fuels Utopia’s reactionary egalitarianism. Utopia satirises the accrual of wealth, where gold is valueless to the Utopians but not their enemies, allowing the

Utopians to pay other nations to perform Utopia’s defensive duties. Much like Utopia, the texts I have chosen portray New Zealand as both a product of modernity and a site preserved from its undesirable developments.

The best way to pursue a critique of utopian and nationalist imagining is thus through the study of texts which reflect these interests. Fredric Jameson writes that “inasmuch as the practice of the genre necessarily includes a generic reference to More’s foundational text, history and the succession of Utopian generations become themselves interiorized within the later Utopias and variously incorporated into the utopian argument” (Archaeologies 143). Jameson’s assertion places all utopias in a dialectic with each other based upon reactions emanating from More’s original. The study of these texts reveals historic changes in attitudes towards utopianism reflecting the changes brought about by modernity. This occurs in the New Zealand context too, where the development of utopian idealism can be traced through texts which attempt to supersede earlier utopias, replacing them with their own ideals.

Nationalism’s relationship with utopianism means that it is also most visible in its literary representations. Homi Bhabha writes in Nation and Narration (1990) that “to encounter the nation as it is written displays a temporality of culture and social consciousness” and this reveals how

“...the image of cultural authority may be ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of 11

‘composing’ its powerful image” (2-3). All of the texts I am looking at demonstrate this composition, showing what Bhabha outlines as the ambivalence of nationalism – the conflation of personal and public interests (2).

The role of the text in early colonisation combines the tropes of nationalism and utopianism in order to aid the act of colonialism. The primary way (and in fact sole way until settlers began sending letters home) of receiving information about early New Zealand settlement was through books written by those who had visited, hence the importance of the texts I am studying for establishing a very real utopian idea in the contemporary reader’s mind. Lydia Wevers assessment of company writers’ works for example, concludes that “the book is the article of commerce which expresses and effects the central transaction of colonisation: the exchange of one culture and its ownership of territory for another” (132). Hence, the written word establishes the paradigms for colonial nationalism, establishing ideas of utopianism and ownership which reverberate long after the initial settlement.

There has been little critical attention paid thus far to the role of utopianism in New Zealand nationalist literature. Lyman Tower Sargent’s “Utopianism and the Creation of New Zealand

National Identity” (2001) addresses similar concepts as my research, but this “first survey” (1) is ultimately more of a catalogue of an impressive range of sources than an argument. Jonathan

Lamb’s essay “The Idea of Utopia in New Zealand” (1999), despite the broad promise of its title, is an analysis of the intersection between Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and New Zealand Company settlement rather than a comprehensive argument about utopianism in New Zealand. I will utilise both these authors’ work, but I hope to contribute further analysis to the subject. There are of course other critics who write about New Zealand nationalism and make reference to utopianism but this is usually brief and not the focus of the research. Hence, I will use the work of critics such as Alex

Calder and Patrick Evans who write about nationalism in New Zealand literature, as well as 12 historians such as James Belich who trace the history of nationalism in New Zealand to inform my work, expanding hopefully on areas which are beyond the scope of these writers’ research.

I have chosen primary texts on the basis of them spanning the nationalist utopian dialectic in

New Zealand literature. Phillip Wegner proposes that the utopian dialectic can be defined by a number of Bakhtinian relationships: “with the traditions of utopian writing that both precede and follow them; with the broader literary and intellectual presents they inhabit; with their variously situated readers; and, finally, with the concerns of the larger cultural and social realities in which they first appear” (5). These relationships indicate my selections too, in that my chosen texts constitute a dialectic which is inter-textual as well as always engaged with the contemporary contexts which define their approach to the tradition. My key aims are to examine the utopian projections of European settlement in New Zealand, look at the role of nationalism in this speculation, examine the effect of settler utopianism on developing local nationalism, and periodise this tradition as a colonial product, affected by modernity. In terms of periodisation, my chosen texts enact a form of “emplotment” in “which a sequence of events fashioned into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind” (White 7). The “events” are my chosen texts, the story is the arc of colonial utopianism. Much like the processes involved in forming the nation and the utopia, I have been forced to include or exclude texts based on how they reflect the patterns that I am looking for.

The chosen works are Narrative of Voyage to New Zealand by JL Nicholas and Adventure in

New Zealand by EJ Wakefield in my first chapter, Erewhon by Samuel Butler and Anno Domini

2000 by Julius Vogel in my second, a third chapter based around John Mulgan’s Man Alone and

Robin Hyde’s Wednesday’s Children, and a final chapter focussed on Smith’s Dream by CK Stead and Intensive Care by Janet Frame. These were all selected because they address the key issues I am looking at while also engaging with previous texts in a form of dialectic. My thesis is divided into 13 four main chapters, each focussing on two works which are indicative of a certain period of writing, chosen for relevance to my initial focus rather than place in any canon of New Zealand literature.

Because I am examining writing which reflects the ideals of Anglocentric colonialism, I have chosen texts written by Pākehā which are focused on the development of mainstream and dominant Pākehā nationalism. My chosen texts are those written in English by Pākehā writers, in a period when this was the dominant mode of New Zealand literature. The emergence of Māori and other cultures’ writing in the early 1970s is partially a reflection of the settler utopian tradition losing its dominance.

I have also only included texts which are formally similar: utopian prose works of novel-length rather than theatre or poetry. This allows for easier comparison that avoids the differences brought about through the technical specifications of form. The continuation of form reveals the ongoing influence of early texts. As a utopian discourse, the chosen texts all demonstrate the tropes of speculation, often framed as a journey through time or space, arriving at a utopian or dystopian destination. This theme demonstrates the ongoing influence of settlement as a theme in these texts as well as the influence of utopian forms on my chosen texts.

These reasons and aims have led me to omit certain works for not fitting the aims of my research. I have begun my period of study with Nicholas’ text because preceding texts are not concerned with settlement so much as exploration and extraction. An example of this would be the diary of Captain Cook. While Cook does invoke nationalism to assert his identity against that of indigenous populations, his work is not concerned with the development of this identity in the colonial space. It is not until the early nineteenth century that texts describe permanent British settlement in New Zealand and address the concerns of this form of emigration.

Texts such as John Logan Campbell’s Poenamo and Frederick Maning’s Old New Zealand published in 1881 and 1863 respectively, do in some ways attempt to address the ideals of early settlement, but both texts are written as retrospective diaries, lacking the speculative energy of other 14 works. Late nineteenth century texts I have omitted obliquely address the outcomes of colonialism but are specific in their outlook, being based around single issues. This includes Edward Tregear’s

Hedged with Divinities (1895) which focusses on the role of women in the national economy, but offers little speculation beyond this.

For my third chapter focused on New Zealand modernist utopianism, I have passed over the early modernist period of writing, best represented by Katherine Mansfield.. If space allowed, an examination of Mansfield’s colonial anti-utopianism would perhaps have been appropriate, but she is less nationalist and less programmatic in her writing than the post-First World War texts I have examined. The literary output of the 1930s is influenced by writers such as Mansfield but expands and redirects nineteenth century ideals more obviously and more aggressively, meaning it better represents a response to utopian settlement than pre-war writing.

My final chapter based on post-World War Two writing addresses perhaps the first wave of

Pākehā writing that abandons the idea of colonial British utopianism at the expense of other peoples. My thesis does not focus on texts beyond this point, as my aim is to periodise this mode of writing as a dominant discourse. Beyond the texts of my final chapter, the tradition is some ways does continue but as part of wider discourse of local nationalism rather than a dominant mode.

The structure of my thesis is chronological, beginning from the start of organised British settlement in New Zealand. The initial planned settlement of New Zealand was not a singular process. Instead, different groups envisaged themselves as being able to realise ideal communities in the colonial space. They competed for prominence, attempting to legitimise themselves through an alignment with nationalist concerns, often by producing books which expressed these concerns.

Amongst these, two significant “pressure groups” emerged. James Belich identifies these as the

Church Missionary Society and the New Zealand Company. The texts chosen to represent these interests are J.L. Nicholas’ diary of missionary life in the Bay of Islands, Narrative of Voyage to 15

New Zealand (1817) and Edward Jerningham Wakefield’s Adventure in New Zealand (1845) which describes the implementation of the New Zealand Company’s settlement.

Nicholas’ text represents the public side of settlement, in that the church mission often paved the way for official settlement. The mission shows the desire of Europeans for Māori to be

“transformed into something European-like and peacefully subordinated to Europe” (Belich, MP

125), in order to preserve European assurance against the threat of “otherness”. There is also a subtext however of British settlement, where the “civilizing” of Māori merely enables settlers to safely extract wealth from the land and live there in great comfort. The civilising mission can be seen as a desire to project Europeans at the perceived pinnacle of civilisation by subordinating the

“other,” as well as a way of clearing the landscape for British colonialism.

Contrasting with Nicholas’ text is Edward Jerningham Wakefield’s diary of New Zealand

Company settlement. The increasing industrialisation of mid-nineteenth century Britain and the increased urbanisation that this brought with it, led Edward Gibbon Wakefield (Jerningham’s father) to envisage preserving a pre-industrial, but still capitalist British society in New Zealand. Jonathan

Lamb writes “in [Wakefield’s] view, Britain’s population had become so large that competition was causing groups of people to prey on one another” (87). To avoid this scenario, Wakefield formed the

New Zealand Company with the aim of establishing a new, more prosperous Britain. In many respects, the New Zealand Company was a money-making scheme, and was aimed at private rather than public interests, enticing investors with promises of New Zealand as a place of capitalist prosperity. Edward Jerningham Wakefield’s text was designed to be an advertisement for the New

Zealand Company for readers in England, and acts as a version of exaggerated reality that emphasises the utopian aspects of his father’s scheme. I am looking at the way that this utopian premise, combined with the fictions of advertising, creates a text which emphasises aspects of utopian belonging in such a way as to be a powerful propaganda tool for developing nationalism. 16

Both Nicholas and Wakefield employ the same method of defining other parties with an interest in New Zealand, especially Māori as external and “other” to a sense of superior British nationalism. In both texts, settlement is presented as a way of fulfilling the potential of this British nationalism as well as preserving it against the effects of modernity, in effect establishing New

Zealand as a utopian space. Despite their differences in terms of private and public interests, and conflicts with each other, both use the same rhetoric to legitimise their own projects, and thus a blueprint for colonial nationalist utopianism is born.

Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and Julius Vogel’s Anno Domini 2000 (1889) respond to earlier utopian texts in a way that reflects the changing historical context of each author. The increasing focus on progress, science and technology in the late nineteenth century inspired Samuel

Butler to produce Erewhon as a rumination on the conflation of these ideas with regard to the utopian impulse of British colonialism. Paired with its sequel Erewhon Revisited (1901), these two texts create an alternative history of New Zealand settlement, where utopian assumptions and processes are problematised. Butler’s texts question specific schemes of settlement such as

Wakefield’s and Nicholas’, especially notions of European superiority and cultural relativity in the wake of Darwinism. Erewhon can be seen as an important questioning of the utopian tradition in

New Zealand literature. Its lack of influence on immediately following texts however, shows the strength of the tradition it attempts to displace. The problematising of Butler’s text though points towards a dynamism and redirection which is adopted in later texts.

Julius Vogel’s vision of the future in Anno Domini 2000 presents New Zealand as an essential member of the British Empire as well as a site of massive material prosperity and continues the theme of New Zealand as a capitalist utopia, essentially building on the ideas of

Wakefield in my first chapter, while stressing the dynamism of capitalism in place of preservation.

Where Butler questions utopian settlement, Vogel reaffirms the boundaries of national belonging 17 and establishes Britishness as central to New Zealand’s national identity. His nationalism relies on the inclusion and exclusion of various “others”: women are the most obvious inclusion and Māori the most obvious exclusion. His dynamic, progressive approach signals an awareness of the problems that Butler presents and an attempt to remove them by suggesting the development of new ideas and identities.

The focus of chapter three is two texts from the 1930s that attempt to realign the trajectory of New Zealand utopianism after the effects of the First World War and other historical developments. The two utopian narratives discussed in this chapter are John Mulgan’s Man Alone

(1939) and Robin Hyde’s Wednesday’s Children (1936). Man Alone may be considered a surprising choice in a study of utopias, but I will argue Mulgan responds to previous utopias by re-imagining the utopian project along Marxist and naturalist guidelines. Mulgan still places settler nationalism at the centre of his utopian imagining by excluding the “other” from his version of utopia. So despite the influence of international movements and an attempt to break from the past, his text carries on the tropes of settler utopianism.

Wednesday’s Children also responds to the concept of New Zealand as a utopia. Hyde’s text criticises the bourgeois establishment of Auckland and its retention of Anglocentric and class-based exclusivity as well as sexism as major aspects of its culture. She responds to Mulgan and the cultural nationalist writers’ exclusion of women from their version of nationalism by imagining a

New Zealand where all marginalised groups such as women, the poor and non-English immigrants are central to nationalism. While this would seem to mean a break from the existing utopian tradition, it is more accurately a redirection. Hyde still places Anglo immigration at the centre of both the old and new versions of New Zealand nationalism, and her utopia metaphorically re-enacts the settlement of New Zealand, creating another interpretation of existing tropes. 18

My final chapter concerns texts from after the Second World War, and it is in these texts that

Pākehā utopianism becomes less confident. Both Smith’s Dream (1971 rev. 1973) by C.K. Stead and Intensive Care (1970) by Janet Frame feature the incursion into New Zealand of a United States that projects its own version of late-capitalist utopia onto the country. New Zealand’s national identity in this period was being affected by the aftermath of the Second World War, the increasing dominance of Cold War politics, and the slow drift of the UK towards European unity. Michael

King writes of the tension in this period between pre-War values, especially a belief in “New

Zealand’s position in the world as unusually blessed” (412), the reality of New Zealand being opened up to the world through post-war migration and cheap air travel, and the rise of the United

States as a Pacific power. These historical changes are reflected in the utopian narratives of this period, where a sense that the special British utopian project may be coming to an end is evident.

Instead, British settlers become the new “other” for an American utopian projection onto New

Zealand.

The competing “dreamworlds” of the Cold War powers influenced the writing of Smith’s

Dream. Stead’s text explores the domination of capitalism over national boundaries, and New

Zealand’s position as a utopian space being increasingly threatened by the global reach of capitalist modernity. The plot follows the rise of a capitalist dictator, Volkner, who appeals to bourgeois values in order to stage a total takeover of political power. It is revealed however that he is a lesser danger to colonial utopianism than neo-imperial capitalist exploitation by the U.S., which displaces previous utopian ideals. Stead imagines the end of colonial nationalism and the beginning of an undefined post-national project but elements of nostalgia for the British colonial project persist. I will compare Smith’s Dream to Janet Frame’s Intensive Care (1970). Presented as three eras of New

Zealand history, Intensive Care portrays the national community as being trapped in a collective dream of unrealisable utopia. It depicts a future New Zealand of nightmare eugenics separating the human population into human and animal categories in an attempt to boost the economy and 19 improve the New Zealand race. Ultimately Frame’s vision is anti-utopian, in that it criticises the utopian idea in itself. Immanuel Wallerstein writes, “utopias are breeders of illusions and therefore, inevitably of disillusions,” (1) an idea that Frame adopts in Intensive Care. She argues that humans are unable to realise utopia, and that utopianism in praxis results only in the destruction of the aspects of reality that are incongruent with utopian visions. The destructive dreams of New

Zealanders are shown to be universal and international, and therefore the text is in some ways anti-nationalist, dismissing the idea of national uniqueness. Like Stead’s text, it signals a change in outlook for the utopian dream in New Zealand, and its apocalyptic vision echoes the end of British utopian colonialism in the face of American neo-imperialism.

I will be arguing that a tradition of writing which utilises the intersecting points of utopianism and nationalism is a visible dialectic that marks the period of colonialism in New

Zealand literature. The tropes of utopianism, that is, the imagining of an ideal society demonstrating an ambivalence towards modernity, are intertwined with nationalism to produce an arc of speculative texts which attempt to appropriate the New Zealand space for their own projections.

The national exclusion and inclusion of people based on subjective definitions is pronounced in the colonial space, particularly when European immigrants encounter indigenous Māori. A utopia built on the assumptions and ideals of Anglocentric settlement necessarily excludes Māori as an “other” which does not factor into an idealised version of Britain, though other groups are excluded too, based on their relation to a utopian ideal. By reading a selected group of texts which reflect the continuance of a colonial utopian project, I will trace how colonial Pākehā nationalism was defined by utopian ideals and concepts. My thesis traces the progression of this tradition from its beginning until a period in which it diverges, showing how the dialectic becomes modified by changing contexts. 20 Chapter One: Early Utopian Speculation and the Establishment of a Tradition.

The beginning of planned European settlement in New Zealand gave rise to the texts which establish the utopian nationalist dialogue. John Liddiard Nicholas’ Narrative of Voyage to New

Zealand (1817), a diary of missionary settlement, and Edward Jerningham Wakefield’s Adventure in New Zealand (1845) which describes the first settlements of the New Zealand Company constitute a literary conflict over how to imagine New Zealand. I have chosen these texts because they both demonstrate a desire to imagine New Zealand as a site for idealised British settlement, but they conflict over how this is defined and how it is to be realised. The contrast between these texts demonstrates the differing ideals of the authors. However the common techniques employed by both authors attests to the development of a literary tradition.

This early period gives rise to a speculative mode of writing where New Zealand is portrayed as a neutral site with enormous potential for settlement. Part of this potential is the chance to replicate an idealised form of Britain. Because utopianism stems from current situations and contemporary suffering, both Nicholas and Wakefield accordingly imagine New Zealand as a site which protects their settlers from the worst aspects of modernity while benefiting from other modern developments. Because of this reflexive utopian approach, nationalism becomes a key aspect of imagining the shape of settlement. If the replication of Britain is a central concern to these descriptions of settlement, then the definition of what actually constitutes an ideal Britain is the central node of the utopian imagining. Nicholas and Wakefield’s differing utopias can therefore be seen as having partially stemmed from different versions of British national imagining.

The flexibility of nationalism and utopianism are employed by each author as tools of exclusion and exclusivity in order to present their own definitions and imaginings as central. 21

No single group had sole control over settlement, and because these groups did not have unified aims, Nicholas and Wakefield employ these tools to justify their position. The national community is imagined differently by both authors in an attempt to argue for their own centrality to settler nationalism, and thus their own version of utopia as being in the interests of both the old nation and the new.

In the process of defining nationalism, those that are “other” are also identified and defined in order to prevent their incursion into civic utopianism. In this era of writing, the exclusion of

Māori, “Pākehā Māori”, women, non-Britons and others is a common theme and essential to understanding the process of exclusion in utopian nationalism. This exclusion functions as a result of settler idealism, where the end result justifies the short-term marginalisation of those who do not fit into prescriptive definitions of ideal nationalism.

The significance of these texts and the mode of writing they employ is that they become the blueprint for later responses. By imagining New Zealand as a utopian site, but only for certain groups of people, Nicholas and Wakefield establish the tradition of colonial utopianism in New

Zealand. The settler utopia, preserved by distance and climatic suitability, and populated only by select groups, becomes a central way of imagining New Zealand as a nation, influencing subsequent generations of writers.

The apparent purpose of Nicholas’ Narrative of Journey to New Zealand was to be an entertaining and exotic book for readers in England. More importantly, however, it begins to enact

Lydia Wevers’ idea of the book as the act of colonisation. Nicholas’ descriptions of the Church

Missionary Society’s work allow us to see how much of the mission was involved in preparing New

Zealand for settlement, even though it was not overtly advocating colonisation. The text demonstrates Nicholas’ hope that an idealised Britain would be realised through colonialism. He states how this would work: “By the colonization of New Zealand, the cause of humanity would be 22 served in a two-fold manner; provision would be made for a distressed class of enlightened mortals, and the civilization of a fine race, who are now sunk in utter ignorance” (Vol. 2 322-323). New

Zealand is unequivocally intended as a settlement that would not be beset by the problems of

Britain, but a utopian reflection of British ideals. Though he never advocates a programmatical form of utopia in a strict sense, Nicholas presents speculative day dreams about the potential of New

Zealand for this kind of replication. This is most pronounced when visiting “Lake Morberee” near the Bay of Islands:

Arriving at the lake, which was called by the natives Morberee, we were exceedingly

gratified with the scene before us, and found it such as might amply repay the toil of a

longer excursion... the landscape bore a strong resemblance to some of those beautiful

pleasure grounds in England, on which the owners bestow so much care and attention...

Should an extensive settlement be ever formed in New Zealand by our people... the

neighbourhood of this lake would form an admirable situation for the seat of

government, and chief town of the colony. The extensive forests that line one side of it,

would afford an immense quantity of timber... The soil here being luxuriant in the

extreme, would produce the most abundant crops, and the labours of the industrious

cultivator would be sure to be requited by a plentiful harvest... A settlement thus

advantageously situated, and under a mild and equitable government, would very soon

become flourishing, and enabled to supply itself in abundance, not only with the

necessities of life, but even with many of its luxuries. (Vol. 1 342-346)

The above passage demonstrates the desire to locate in New Zealand a space of sufficient neutrality and suitability for utopian replication. New Zealand is here established as a site of prosperity rather than mere survival, in contrast to Malthusian views of an overcrowded England. Eric Hobsbawm writes that the conditions of working class Britons in the early nineteenth century, largely due to 23 industrialisation and urbanisation, was “appalling” and that these conditions were “actually deteriorating was widely assumed” (AOR 205). Nicholas writes of “many valuable members of society... pining all over the nation in extreme indigence” (Vol. 2 322), and how colonisation of New

Zealand would alleviate this.

Nicholas’ being “exceedingly gratified” indicates a sense that settlement is a high priority despite earlier claims of disinterestedness, and for the reader in Britain, this utopian scene would seem to fulfil many of their desires, be they national or personal interests. The potential for

“Morberee” to provide settlers with not just “necessities of life, but even with many of its luxuries” is an appeal to bourgeois values, and represents utopian aspirations for both the working class and the increasing middle class of 1815. The repetition of terms such as “abundant,” “luxuriant” and

“immense” would suggest Nicholas is attempting to thoroughly emphasize to his readers the potential of New Zealand for colonization. The descriptions fit those of the estates of English gentry

(especially Nicholas’ allusion to pleasure-grounds), meaning New Zealand is presented as a place where all the existing classes of England are promoted to the top rung of national belonging and material fulfilment.

There is here also an ambivalent approach to modernity, specifically industrialisation.

Nicholas’ eye frequently falls upon resources such as timber and arable land, and his hopes for the settlement to be a model of industry help to establish this as central to his version of utopia. He writes of another potential site for settlement that “it would produce not only grain enough for their own consumption, but leave such a surplus as might supply the shipping that should arrive there”

(Vol 2. 82), and that the potential for whaling, sealing, fishing and agriculture in other areas are all capable of providing “an industrious and enterprising colony” (Vol. 2 320). Industry and capitalism are clearly part of Nicholas’ imagining, but New Zealand is also intended to remain free of the problems of overcrowding and pollution that accompanied industrialisation in England. 24

Importantly, with comparison to his own England, a “mild and equitable government” is a priority. At this time, the prevention of “a second French revolution... was the supreme object of all the powers which had just spent more than twenty years in defeating the first; even of the British...”

(Hobsbawm, AOR 109). This kind of oppression was responsible for events such as the Spa Fields and Peterloo riots and subsequent massacres of 1816 and 1819 respectively and indicates how

Nicholas’ hopes for equitable government are more utopian than may be realised by a modern reader. A “mild” government indicates perhaps a desire to give the church more power in the colonial nation.

The language that Nicholas employs also points towards a religious asceticism in his vision, which is perhaps incongruent with his other descriptions. This mode is apparent when he writes that the sight “amply re[paid] toil of a longer excursion” and would benefit the “industrious” settler. By making these ideas apparent, Nicholas is suggesting that asceticism and hard work is central to achieving utopian settlement. However, when he also refers to the “pleasure grounds of England” as requiring “so much care and attention”compared to the sights found in New Zealand, he is implying the ease with which utopia is achieved, conflicting with ascetic reward. This shows how even within one settler’s vision, the New Zealand landscape is described in different ways to suit any particular agenda. There is such a desire to see the colony as site which fulfils many ideals, that its description becomes contradictory and unstable in order to conform to settler desires.

Edward Jerningham Wakefield’s Adventure in New Zealand published nearly thirty years later attempts to describe New Zealand’s potential in similarly positive terms but with differing ideals; adapting ideas of nationalism and utopian settlement to suit his own agenda. Wakefield was the son of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, prominent colonisation theorist and founder of the New

Zealand Association (later renamed the New Zealand Company). Adventure in New Zealand is the younger Wakefield’s diary of the first settlement mission of the company in 1839. The purpose of 25 the voyage was to establish New Zealand Company settlements in New Zealand, as well as race the

British Government to claim land before right of purchase was transferred to the crown. His intention in writing his diary was to both advertise to potential settlers the benefits of investing in

New Zealand Company settlement, as well as assert the New Zealand Company’s interests against those of the government and other competing parties.

New Zealand Company settlement is often described as utopian, in that it attempted to build a “Better Britain” (a term employed by James Belich and Michael King among others) in the South

Pacific. The New Zealand Company intended to systematically colonise New Zealand, with settlements including Wellington, Whanganui, Nelson, New Plymouth and less directly

Christchurch and Dunedin, replicating idealised versions of Britain in these sites. As it was a

Company, the settlement required investment from willing emigrants, and thus Wakefield’s text offers an even more advertorial style than Nicholas’ because it was recruiting settlers. The following passage demonstrates some of the key aspects of Adventure in New Zealand’s utopian vision and its advertorial nature:

Each capitalist appeared to have a following of labourers from his own part of the

country. Cornish miners and agricultural labourers had pitched their tents near Mr.

Molesworth; Kentish men dwelt near Mr. George Duppa, a little higher up; and many

of the Scotch emigrants were collected near a point between two reaches of the river,

where Mr. Dudley Sinclair and Mr. Barton were erecting their dwellings. At the latter

place Mr. Sinclair’s English cow was browsing on the shrubs of her newly-adopted

country... Then the mildness of the climate, the good preparations before leaving

England, and the hearty good feeling existing among the colonists themselves as well

as between them and the natives, all tended to give the extensive bivouac the air of a 26

pic-nic on a large scale, rather than a specimen of the first hardships of a colony.

(Wakefield, Vol. 1 200-201)

Space and land take on great importance in both the younger and older Wakefield’s descriptions of settlement. As in Nicholas’ writing, the use of terms such as “extensive” and “large scale” are employed by Jerningham Wakefield to suggest that a large terra nullius was available to settlers.

The flourishing of the colony is predicated on an abundance of natural resources and so Wakefield also stresses this in his descriptions of the landscape. One of his earlier descriptions of New

Zealand’s landscape creates this idea describing the sight of, “the luxurious vegetation of grass and shrubs, and the wild carrots and turnips which remain as relics of our great navigator” (Vol. 1 24).

The flourishing of Cook’s vegetables (and his veneration compared to other explorers) suggests this inverted landscape offers identical benefits to the settler as any farm in Britain would, and eliminates the time required to reap the harvest of fertile land, though this ignores the fact that

Māori were systematically farming the vegetables that Wakefield was observing. Instead, the abundance of Cook’s vegetables suggests that colonization has already partly taken place, and that the landscape is keenly suited to British agriculture.

For Wakefield’s reader in Britain, New Zealand’s space offered new opportunities for settlement away from the increasing overcrowding in the large industrial cities of Britain. However, the key target of this text was not the working poor of these large cities, but rather a more affluent section of British society. Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s Art of Colonization (1849) though published after his son’s text, represents a culmination of the ideals of the New Zealand Company. In it, the older Wakefield describes Britain as suffering from a “want of room” (65), by which he means “a want of the means of a comfortable subsistence according to the respective standards of living established among the classes” (66). Accordingly the settlements were to be sites where “English 27 class distinctions were preserved but where industrious artisans and farmers could more easily work their way towards prosperity and respectability” (King 172).

The quoted passage demonstrates this maintenance of class differences and the favouring of the wealthier classes. The migrants are divided into classes within which they are satisfied, as evidenced by the clutch of men each capitalist has willingly following him. Wakefield’s description of the settlers at Hutt implies a difference in importance between those with money and those without, in that those with money are mentioned by name such as Mr. Molesworth and Mr. Duppa, and have a group of anonymous labourers attached to them and subordinated to their needs. The distinction is made more apparent when Wakefield describes the meal of “preserved meat and good vegetables... [and] good beer and wine” of the capitalists, while the labourers ate an “equally comfortable” though clearly not as salubrious stew of “ration meat and potatoes or cabbages” (Vol.

1 201). This indicates how much of the New Zealand Company model of settlement was based on privileging those with capital, but how poorer settlers hoped to further themselves financially too.

The New Zealand Company utopia was thus based more heavily on self-interest than Nicholas’, through its emphasis on capitalist, individual success rather than egalitarian abundance. The solution of creating room for people and capital by colonising New Zealand creates a heterotopian mirror world of Britain, which retained class structures but increased mobility within or even between classes, where the wealthy were dominant. This reflects contemporary fears of the British industrial city where the supposedly ’moral’ wealthier classes perceived a loss of influence over the poor, and “it was assumed that an undifferentiated poor would be led astray by the least desirable elements in its own ranks” (Dennis 49).

Wakefield’s description of settlement as a “pic-nic”, rather than “first hardships”, underlines the intention to sell the idea of settlement to his readers. The advertorial nature of Wakefield’s text means that the basic heterotopia is transformed into utopia and even Cockaigne in its exaggerated promise. Because of these commercial intentions, Adventure in New Zealand’s “readership was 28 finely calculated and targeted” (Wevers 130), directed at readers with the wealth and means to be able to emigrate to New Zealand. This is how Wakefield’s text and its audience (along with other similar texts published by New Zealand Company writers) established a sense of identity amongst settlers of utopian belonging and purpose that eventually translated into utopian nationalism.

Taking this transaction into account, the nature of the settling culture is a specifically idealistic one, as the process of buying and reading Wakefield’s diary begins a process of self-fulfilment for the

New Zealand Company’s utopian scheme. The title of this thesis comes from a diary of a

Christchurch-bound settler: the “much wished for shore” (Kennaway 62) representing the promise of Company settlement. Even for those settlers who arrived and were disappointed, a belief in the promises of the investment they had already made instigated a conscious attempt to realise its lies, or hide their failure from relatives in the old-country. James Belich writes of settlers that “a reluctance to admit mistakes, and an inclination to persuade other people to share them to reduce the sense of error, appears to be human nature” (MP 282). A system of chain-migration based on stories of paradise constitutes a utopian system where settlers are forced to create utopia to satisfy their pre-conceptions of settlement. In this sense, the text serves as both a description of a utopian scheme, and as a narrative utopia in itself in its imagined description of a non-existent but potential version of New Zealand. The kind of boosterism Wakefield employs was a much more powerful advertisement than abstract theories, and essential for the self-fulfilling system to at least partially succeed.

The New Zealand Company’s target settlers differ greatly from Nicholas’. The ideal settler as described by Nicholas points towards a future utopian nationalism that differs from the wealth-favouring view of Wakefield. Nicholas’ ideal settlers “would be honest and industrious artisans and labourers, who have never been guilty of any crimes to banish them from their country, though they might be willing to leave it for one where they could procure the means of living with 29 more convenience and facility” (Vol. 1 347). This description indicates that his utopian settlement would be one where the (perhaps romanticised) working class is lifted from suffering in Britain and able to realise its potential in New Zealand. This automatically suggests an egalitarian utopia where the class divisions of Britain are non-existent in the colony, reminiscent too of the early socialism described (though not necessarily prescribed to) in More’s Utopia. With the increased industry and luxury afforded by New Zealand’s ample resources, there would be no suffering proletariat. His imagining of colonial prosperity is not restricted to the already wealthy, but instead constitutes a proposal for an egalitarian society of equally prosperous settlers, rescued from suffering in Britain.

These differing projections of who would constitute the ideal settler indicate differing definitions of ideal British nationalism, as well as conflicting ideas as to how realise the potential of the utopian space. The key conflict between these two texts then is the role of class and wealth in the colonial utopian nation. This competition leads to the criticism of each other’s ideals in order to project their own as truly utopian, in the process establishing a dialectic of settler utopianism. This process is what continues for the entire colonial period, where the author imagines the establishment of a New Zealand nation with their own interests as central to a utopian outcome, and older versions of settlement as failed or somehow insufficient as models for utopia. The ongoing conflation and confusion as to public and private interests in the imagining of the nation becomes a key way that these authors metaphorically supplant other imaginings to make their own projections appear to be of national interest.

Disagreement between the New Zealand Company and the British Government over land sales meant that Company settlements were becoming difficult to establish and a genuine conflict of ownership became apparent. The CMS opposition to Company settlements was based on the harmful effects that settlement may have on the Māori population, as well as the self-interested 30 nature of it settlement. But unfortunately for the CMS, it is exactly the work that they had already put into fostering relations between themselves and Māori that allowed for the New Zealand

Company to become so effective. Wakefield counters state and church opposition by utilising the disagreement over class structures in the colony as a means of diminishing the success of earlier colonisation.

By placing an emphasis on class as being central to his ideal nationalism, Wakefield implies that more egalitarian forms of settlement such as those proposed and attempted by the CMS were harmful to national well-being. His father writes that “the most respectable emigrants, more especially if they have a good deal of property... most beneficially [affect the colony’s] standard of morals and manners” (Gibbon Wakefield 136), protecting British nationalism from degenerating in isolation. His attitude towards the labouring class is expressly manifested in The Art of Colonization as a fear of uprising: “the singular state of our political economy renders us peculiarly liable to injury from merely political disturbance; and that it is well worth while to try colonization, or anything that affords chance of reducing that competition amongst the working classes which is the cause of their political discontent” (71). Expressed clearly here is that the nation belongs to those in power, and the working classes being agitated clearly presents a threat to this security. The older

Wakefield even foregrounds social improvement movements such as Chartism and socialism as

“fearful dangers” (68), indicating that his sympathies lie not with this form of utopian social improvement but rather maintenance of a status quo that benefits those with capital. Eric

Hobsbawm writes that nationalism is “constructed essentially from above, but which cannot be understood unless also analysed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist” (Nations 10). This is reflected in New Zealand Company colonisation where the interests of the nation are those of the ruling elite, of those with money, and the incentive for settlers 31 with less money is financial improvement, which may precede access to power or inclusion in guiding national interests.

Having established the bourgeoisie as being the main benefactors and providers of utopian colonisation, Edward Jerningham Wakefield then criticises the Church Missionary Society settlements for not preventing the degeneration of British nationalist ideals in its inclusion of people from less wealthy backgrounds:

These men, calculated to be excellent colonists, became enraptured with the fertile soil

and productive climate; and selfishness of a pardonable nature began to mingle with their

actions when they became private owners of land, in order to provide a maintenance for

their large families of children. As these carpenters, shoemakers, and schoolmasters, too,

were left alone without a man of superior intelligence to guide the working of their

efforts on the social as well as the spiritual state of a nation, they gradually learned to

neglect the respect due to the institution of chieftainship, and to rejoice, to an unchristian

degree, in the influence and power which they had themselves acquired. (Vol. 2 445)

The working men, identified by their occupations, are presented as too easily corrupted by power and are in need a ruling class to keep them in check. The characterisation of the working classes as immoral and unable to uphold nationalist values is intended to suggest his capitalist-favouring system as central to New Zealand’s success. The suggestion that “a man of superior intelligence” is one who has experience of land-ownership and power is a clear indicator that Wakefield is attempting to portray his own target settlers as more beneficial to utopian settlement than those picked by the missionaries. Reports that he had “succumbed to the power of an absolute hedonism found only beyond the absolute reach of regular social order and discipline”

(Temple 279), however proved the opposite to be true. Nevertheless, it demonstrates how much his version of nationalism is imagined and subjective rather than pertaining to empirical information. 32

Even the nascent state of already existing settler nationalism is invoked in Adventure in New

Zealand in order to demonstrate how a national identity was forming separately from CMS and

British government plans. Wakefield describes the apparent tension between settlers and the government when describing Governor Hobson’s arrival in Whanganui:

As the boat grated on the silent and almost deserted beach, some nameless tuft-hunter

came up just in time with a mob of about forty ragged labourers, whom he had

collected among the idlers at a public-house, and they raised a very faint cheer,

probably because badly paid for... Beyond this, I will venture to say that no land-

owner, no holder of capital, no respectable mechanic or decent tradesman, no person

who had a name to lose, assisted at the disembarkation. (Vol. 2 46)

The idea that nobody of import was willing to risk their reputation by welcoming the governor suggests that New Zealand was already forming into an independent nation, not under the control of the colonial government. Wakefield’s use of litotes and repetition signals the demographic groups who he does believe are worthy members of the nation. Rather than “ragged labourers” who are “nameless” his ideal citizens are those with land and capital, and their refusal to acknowledge the governor indicates the failure of the state to adequately colonise New Zealand in the best manner. This places the state at odds with Wakefield’s imagined nationalism, reinforcing the centrality of the New Zealand Company’s utopian scheme instead. When summarising Hobson’s visit, he presumes that Hobson must have been “deeply mortified at the manly independence of the settlers” and that if the situation did not change, an “unnatural war was still to continue between

[the settlers’] legal protector and themselves” (Vol. 2 76-77). 33

Adventure in New Zealand contains many other references to missionary activity in an attempt to discredit it, often with reference to nationalism. One such passage suggests that missionaries welcomed French penal colonies in New Zealand (Vol. 1 5), in an attempt to undermine their ability to create a settler utopia for Britons. In fact the missionaries actively worked to keep other nations out of New Zealand, especially catholic ones (Belich, MP 135). Wakefield also suggests that missionaries introduced the idea of “land-sharking” into New Zealand, buying land cheaply and unfairly from Māori (something which the New Zealand Company regularly did) becoming a model for undesirables who “straggled into New Zealand” (5). According to Wakefield, the potential settler nation is at risk of dilution by unwanted forces if the CMS were to have their way. However, these claims are spurious at best, and reflect instead an attempt to deflect criticism levelled at the Company back onto the CMS. Wakefield does acknowledge these accusations of self-interest from missionaries. He signals an awareness of the view that the New Zealand Company intended to “buy all [Māori] land and drive them to the mountains” (Vol. 1 250) but turns this back on the missionaries accusing Reverend Henry Williams of stating “that he wished to have some share in the profits likely to accrue from the growth of the infant colony” (275). Thus national interests as opposed to personal are presented as being integral to the New Zealand Company plan, where the missionaries hypocritically hoped to only personally profit.

Missionary and New Zealand Company settlement also faced potential opposition from groups other than each other. Both Nicholas and Wakefield also refer to other groups of people living in New Zealand, and again use the imagined identity of the nation to exclude these groups from having an influence on their own brand of settler utopianism. Because both Nicholas and

Wakefield are concerned with ideal replications of Britain, the marginalisation of those groups that pose a threat to their imagined idea of Britishness becomes a central aspect of the utopian narrative.

Once this is done, the establishment of a new hierarchy with themselves at the top level completes 34 the nationalist process, and demonstrates who the utopian project of New Zealand is really intended to benefit.

The most pressing concern for those wishing to colonise New Zealand was the visible and unavoidable presence of Māori. In both Nicholas’ and Wakefield’s projections, Māori stand in the way of the utopian exploitation of New Zealand’s resources (this includes space) and thus need to be somehow diminished or nullified. Part of this process occurred because of the threat Māori posed to Eurocentric humanism. Māori threatened “otherness” and so in both texts are drawn into a British system of knowledge in order to diminish their disruption to the national project, while still remaining external to belonging in the settler nation. This enacts a similar process to what occurred during the British occupation of Egypt described by Arthur James Balfour and mediated by Edward

Said:

Knowledge to Balfour means surveying a civilization from its origins to its prime to its

decline – and of course, it means being able to do that...to have knowledge of such a

thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. (32)

Nicholas’ colonization by knowledge begins when he attempts to downplay the threat that

Māori may pose to settlers. Lydia Wevers observes that one of the first events of Nicholas’ narrative is to travel to Whangaroa, the site of the Boyd massacre of 1809 where Māori killed between 60-70 people on board the trading ship. The purpose of visiting this site of contemporary notoriety was to diminish the threat of Māori so that the “civilizing presence of the mission [could] be established”

(Wevers, CoW 27). Nicholas writes of the suffering that a Māori chief (“George”) was subjected to by the captain of the Boyd, and offers the following justification for the events: 35

Man, whether in a rude or civilized state, is never disposed to passive quiescence under

the goading hand of oppression, and few are magnanimous enough to neglect an

opportunity of revenge whenever it presents itself. (Vol. 1 152)

The actions of George and other Māori is justified by Nicholas as the natural reaction by any group of humans subjected to oppression and tyranny. Nicholas’ moral judgement however makes it implicit that he can see the folly of revenge where Māori cannot, re-establishing their inferiority without restoring their threat. His admission that revenge is sought after by both “rude and civilized” peoples indicates that Nicholas also places himself above “lesser” Europeans, who are not above retribution. Anne Salmond refers to this kind of class-based approach to justice in The Trial

Of The Cannibal Dog (2003), writing of Cook’s refusal to take revenge against Māori for killing members of his crew because retribution was not “enlightened”. Cook’s working-class crew however were incensed and took revenge on a dog in form of substitute trial (Salmond 3-4), demonstrating a difference in class-based value systems , and an implicit suggestion by Nicholas that he is of the “enlightened” class.

Nicholas does, however, stop short of accepting Māori as equal to any Europeans, by constantly citing their “obnoxious barbarism” (Vol. 1 2), and describing them as “hostile savages”

(42). He elucidates this difference between civilised and uncivilised people in the following passage:

But here let me observe, that though the savage does possess all the passions of Nature, pure

and unadulterated, and though he may in many instances feel stronger and more acutely than

the man of civilized habits; still he is inferior to him in every other respect: the former is a

slave to the impulse of his will, the latter has learned to restrain his desires; the former

stands enveloped in the dark clouds of ignorance, the latter goes forth in the bright sunshine 36

of knowledge; the former views the works of his Creator through the medium of a blind

superstition, the latter through the light of reason and of truth. (Vol. 1 87)

This passage demonstrates the extent to which Nicholas attempts to distance Māori from belonging to a settler nation, by arguing that the settlers were superior to the indigenous population. Māori are equated with the “dark clouds” and “blind superstition” of those without “civilisation”. Knowledge and reason bring light, which alludes to utopianism, according to Nicholas, and possession of these meant that the CMS were justified in attempting to convert Māori. The alignment of the church with

“reason” instead of “superstition” is not explained by Nicholas. While he is obviously concerned with the “civilising” of Māori, this may be read largely as a way of folding them into a system perfect for market exploitation. He writes that a “spirit of civilized industry” would inspire Māori

“moral improvement” (Vol. 1 346-347), and thus justifies their exploitation by settlers, reinforcing the subjectivity of his utopia. The equating of Māori with “Nature, pure and unadulterated” is a romantic way of justifying their displacement too. By making Māori part of the landscape, rather than owners of the land, Nicholas removes their agency as subjects of utopian industry.

Nicholas then begins to fit Māori into a framework of European understanding by deciding that they may historically be related to Europeans, or at least have had access to European

“civilisation” but are now degraded due to isolation. He writes of several Māori customs including ideas about the creation of humanity which he deems to be similar to Christian customs. This leads him to believe that it was extremely probable that “these islands may have been first colonized from some parts of the East, and that the original settlers may have brought with them some knowledge of the true account of creation; but which knowledge, their posterity, degenerating into barbarism and darkness, were not able to preserve” (Vol. 1 59-60). The notion that Māori are a race of people who were previously civilised but now degenerated creates a circular notion of history for Nicholas.

It shows a fear of regression as much as a belief in progression, and indicates that Nicholas’ 37 utopianism is not static but dynamic. The fear of degeneration and the idea that something that was once civilised can degenerate implies that society is not fixed, but rather dynamic and as Māori fell into the “dark clouds of ignorance” so too could Britain if its problems are not solved. Luckily, the colonial space offers a solution in its opportunity to rebuild society in the religious mould, and hence maintain civilisation rather than let it waste away.

Adventure in New Zealand follows a similar path of national exclusion and subordination as

Narrative and shows how the reduction of Māori rights in New Zealand is a key aspect of all forms of colonial utopianism, despite other differences. Māori are continually defined as “wild”

(Wakefield, Vol. 1 23), “rude” in appearance (26), “rude and uncivilized,” “defective” (41),

“savage” (41), “inhuman” (120) and numerous other descriptions of a similar nature. These descriptions exclude Māori from the loose category of “civilised” people (even from humanity) to which Wakefield believes he belongs. When comparing himself and other Britons to Māori,

Wakefield’s primary descriptor is “white” instead of British. He refers to a Māori chief attempting to “adopt civilized customs and to encourage the friendship and society of the White man” (119), and distances himself from acts of vengeance perpetrated by Māori as not the way “White men” deal with murder. Anyone who is white, let alone British is superior to the “savage”. Owing to the exclusion of Māori from human belonging, Wakefield is able to metaphorically displace them through his book, by showing how they welcome the arrival of superior humans, much in the same way that Nicholas describes his mission. This idea is first introduced when he is writing about buying land in the Cook Strait. He writes that the gathered Māori are not interested in goods in exchange for their land, but rather “declared that their principal object was to get white people to live among them” (Vol. 1 89). The desire to actually become English is apparently expressed by

Warepori in the following passage: 38

He concluded after his speech, after getting into the boat, by saying that his wish had

been to satisfy everybody, and that he had kept nothing for himself; that he should

learn English, and go to England. He laid his head on Colonel Wakefield’s knee, and

said that if the natives were discontented with him, he should live with the White

men, and that the tribe of England should be his fathers. (95)

Aside from the paternal (English) superiority that Wakefield tries to attribute to his uncle, this passage demonstrates how the invasion of space by company settlers needs to be managed by

Wakefield to make it appear beneficial to all parties. The extremely patronising relationship he describes where Warepori sits at the knee of Colonel Wakefield indicates the way that Wakefield perceives the relationship between settlers and Māori. Warepori’s words also appear designed to suggest that Māori feel inferior themselves, and see English settlement as a form of betterment and utopianism, much like Nicholas suggests with his account of “civilising”.

This displacement also required the diminishing of Māori ownership of land. Jerningham

Wakefield attempts to metaphorically dispossess Māori of land in an attempt to claim it justly for the colony. He writes of how “unsettled a state was the proprietorship of land about Cook’s Strait... it seemed plain that, even with regard to the ownership of their villages and potato-gardens, might constituted the only right” (Vol. 1 38, his emphasis). This reduces Māori concepts of land ownership to mere occupation and separates their presence from the rightful ownership of land, while ignoring the massive disruptions caused by European involvement in the Musket Wars which unsettled the

Cook Strait region. This definition of land-ownership also ended the life of Wakefield’s uncle,

Captain Arthur Wakefield at the hand of Te Rauperaha in 1843. Captain Wakefield attempted to arrest Rauperaha for challenging New Zealand Company land-ownership but ended up killed in a

“confused fight” (Belich, MP 205), while Raupereha retained possession of the land. 39

Nicholas and Wakefield both approach a different kind of European settlement: the sailors and beachcombers living out a form of libertarian utopia in New Zealand, in the same way they do with Māori. Both authors present themselves as “moral” and “civilised” and therefore central to their respective visions of national imagining, where the sealers and whalers are by contrast presented as lawless and immoral; corrupted and degenerate versions of Europeans. Despite the displacing project that both Nicholas and Wakefield attempt to present as being capable of bringing about utopia in New Zealand, these authors present the interests of Māori as being the key reason for excluding the macaronic coastal communities from the future of the colony. Both texts describe the author’s group as beneficial to the Māori population compared to the potential harm that the

“degenerate” other settlers would have, which in turn leads to speculating about the image of a future settlement if the working men were to colonise unheeded.

James Belich writes that the missionaries thought of themselves “as agents of virtue, and almost everyone else, the agents of vice” (MP 129), and Nicholas’ text reflects this. He denounces the sailors who visited the coasts of New Zealand as “worthless” with “callous hearts” (Vol. 1 2) and writes that “the missionary establishment...operated as a check on the conduct of the seamen” (Vol.

2 158). With regard to their behaviour towards Māori, he writes “it is strange how Europeans should indulge this malevolent disposition towards savages” (162).

Wakefield continues this theme, making special effort to visit various European inhabitants of New Zealand, using different methods to reduce their claim to national belonging. The first is to equate whalers and sealers as a kind of separate race as he does with Māori, allowing them to be excluded in the same way. They are described in ethnographic terms, as “a class of men, peculiar to the South Seas” and having had the “opportunity of observing them whilst they were unimpaired in originality” gives this race the name “the whalers” while speculating that there may be “some varieties of the genus which also have their own nomenclature” (Vol. 1 310-311). He describes their communication in a similar way: “Their whole language in fact is an argot, or slang, almost 40 unintelligible to a stranger” (Vol. 1 318). He speculates, “never, perhaps, was there a community composed of such dangerous materials and so devoid of regular law,” (49) it would be “frightful to calculate what might have been the consequences had these rough colonizers allowed to go many more years unheeded” (341). Wakefield’s description of these seamen, despite their origins, is very similar to that of Māori, and utilises his description of his own schemes’ virtues to reflect unfavourably upon the sailors.

Philippa Mein Smith notes however that Māori were not taken advantage of by these groups, but rather approached their settlement pragmatically. She notes:

If they were useful in trade, becoming friends, they were found wives.... Subsequently

they intermarried with whalers who established shore whaling stations from the late

1820s, as part of a defence strategy against northern encroachment. (30)

What Mein Smith makes clear is that Māori were not passively accepting of whaling stations, but actively sought to make alliances with the whalers for their own benefit. There are texts which record this alternative settlement, such as Robert McNab’s Murihiku (1905) which gathers together information on sealing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the south of New

Zealand. There are many stories of integration and trade with Māori by the sealing gangs in

Murihiku such as the account of a visiting Australian gang that “a most friendly intercourse, mutually advantageous to both them and the natives, took place” (79) or other accounts such as that of James Coddell who “was captured at the age of sixteen years and spent as many more years among the natives of Tavai-Poenammou” (217). These examples show Māori agency in dealing with these sailors as well as a willingness to integrate Europeans into their own communities.

The integration of Europeans into Māori communities shows another form of utopian expansion that undermines the assumed dominance and correctness of British nationalism, and so 41 both Nicholas and Wakefield disparage these settlers to remove them as a threat to their own process of utopian construction. Their existence undermines the right to colonise for both Wakefield and Nicholas, and their willingness to engage and integrate with Māori means that the assumptions of superior nationalism found in Nicholas and Wakefield’s works are undermined. Their exclusion based on class-based assumptions would come to be challenged by both Mulgan and Hyde in their re-imagining of settlement in the 1930s.

Nationalist exclusion applies to women too in both Nicholas and Wakefield’s texts, establishing a pattern which is responded to by later writers. In both of these early texts, there is very little mention of women, and when it does occur, it is either very brief, or a presentation of

Māori women as colonial objects to admire. One of the few mentions of any women in Nicholas’ text for example is of an unnamed wife of Duaterra, a Māori chief. Nicholas describes her face as having “many beauties which were both interesting and attractive” (Vol. 1 178) but offers little beyond this. Both Nicholas and Wakefield are only concerned with describing women when it is an opportunity to show the difference between colonialists and Māori in terms of gender relations.

Each author attempts to present their own version of gender relations as correct, by describing scenes amongst Māori in terms of horror and disgust. For example, Nicholas writes that

In proportion as nations advance or retrograde in civilization, so we find the female sex

treated with a greater or less degree of gentleness and affection. Countries distinguished

for their refinement are also conspicuous for admitting women to their proper rank in

society; and it is only in states where rudeness and barbarism are found to exist, that

those beings, who were designed by nature to be the solace of man in his progress

through life, are made wretched slaves to his presumptuous tyranny. Thus it happens in 42

New Zealand, where woman is born only to labour incessantly for her task master...

(Vol. 2 301)

This passage reveals a comfortable certainty in Nicholas that the subordinate role of women in his ideal society is not the same as the treatment afforded to women in “barbaric” cultures. His assuredness that women are “designed by nature to be the solace of man” shows his belief in a natural order of gender relations. However, for women to be forced to labour in Māori society is seen by him as a sign of degeneration and barbarism, seemingly dismissing working-class women at the same time. Māori men are “presumptuous” in this treatment, where Nicholas’ views are

“distinguished” and “refined” by contrast. Regardless, both models of gender relation offer little agency to women. Thus the quite similar lack of agency afforded to women in Nicholas’ own society and that of the Māori he encounters is described in such a way as to create contrast and difference to justify his superiority.

Wakefield too uses the description of the treatment of Māori women as a way of distancing himself from their culture. One scene in which he describes a woman being punished for her husband’s adultery is significant because of Wakefield’s lack of interest in her well-being and instead concern with the return of a ship. This shows that his interest lies in portraying Māori as somehow “cruel” and “violent” while not actually being interested enough to intervene:

He stripped her naked, and dragged her along the beach by the hair of her head, beating

her violently at intervals. Nor did anyone attempt to interfere; the whole body of natives

remaining passive spectators of the cruel penalty...

We had begun to despair the disappearance of the brig... (Vol. 1 178) 43

The juxtaposition of the “cruel” scene with Wakefield’s concern over his transport situation shows his desire to distance Māori from his version of ideal society, but also how the welfare of this particular woman is not of his concern. He is seemingly critical of other Māori who are “passive spectators” while also doing nothing himself to help. Like Nicholas, the descriptions of Māori treatment of women are mostly designed as a distancing measure rather than an indictment of gender subordination.

The dominance of male culture in early European settlement is a noted feature of New

Zealand’s colonial history, and would come to influence many later texts such as Anno Domini

2000 and Man Alone. Jock Phillips notes that “Victorian Britain, like all Western societies sustained a belief in the subordination of women to men, and much of the male stereotype in New Zealand was clearly an amplification of the ‘Home’ experience” (4). It is noteworthy that neither Nicholas nor Wakefield attempt to change or challenge this model of society in their versions of ideal settlement. Women are very rarely discussed in their texts, and only function as the supporting cast to the pioneer men who are building the utopian nation. This exclusivity actually resulted in a shortage of women in the colonial context, to the extent that the New Zealand Company actually attempted to “import” brides for its settlers to marry (Belich 306), in the belief that women would help uphold “moral” society in the colony.

Both authors also attempt to describe New Zealand as distinct from other colonial projects which asserts the process of imagining New Zealand as somehow unique in its aspirations for settlement. As comparison and relativity is so important for national definition, by describing other colonies as unsuitable for European settlement, New Zealand is defined as better. In particular, New

Zealand’s closest neighbour Australia becomes the target of much unfavourable comparison. James

Belich describes the image of Australia in the contemporary Briton’s mind as “an arid waste populated by convicts” (MP 283). This was an unwanted association for utopian New Zealand, and 44 so New Zealand was constantly emphasised as being different and better than the other colonies.

The most immediate way that this is addressed by Nicholas is by comparing the climates of the two colonies. In making a comparison between New Zealand and New South Wales, Nicholas reveals that he “has a stronger motive for this contrast, which is to shew that the former country is in this respect far better adapted for an European colony than the latter” (Vol. 2 234). An empirical comparison between the New Zealand and New South Wales climate follows, whereby Nicholas systematically states the reasons for New Zealand’s superiority, in order to diminish the “flattering accounts given by Europeans of the climate of New South Wales” (243), and present his own supposedly factual analysis.

Wakefield adopts the approach of presenting other colonies as inferior to his own version of settlement, but also attacks prior colonisation in New Zealand in order to show its failure to realise a utopia sympathetic to his own concerns. Edward Gibbon Wakefield in his Art of Colonization also makes comparisons to other colonies, including the previous state of New Zealand settlement, in order to establish his version of New Zealand colonialism as distinctly utopian. He writes that there is not one colony “of which an Englishman can be proud” (6) emphasising a need for better colonisation. This is evident in the younger Wakefield’s text in the way he presents missionary colonisation as failed in order to boost his own theories.

The ongoing tension between differing conceptions of utopia and nationalism is established by the relationship between early texts such as Adventure in New Zealand and Narrative of Voyage to New Zealand. These texts establish the tradition of imagining New Zealand as a site for utopian replication by presenting the landscape as an unspoilt and unmodified site waiting to be colonised.

The question of how to colonise; what to replicate from Britain and what should be omitted then becomes central to the concerns of these writers as they imagine the future of the colony. Despite the competition between these two forms of prominent settlement, they share the desire to establish 45 themselves as central to British reconstruction in New Zealand, to produce a new colony that is not tainted by the problems of the home country while still retaining its identity.

The pattern of metaphorical displacement is inaugurated in the relationship between the texts of Nicholas and Wakefield. This tradition is witnessed in Wakefield’s reaction to Nicholas’ text where settlement is re-enacted in the later text and the ideas of the earlier writer are dismissed and criticised. This chapter shows this clear distinction and conflict between Nicholas’ missionary utopia and Wakefield’s Company settlement plan. As the later writer, Wakefield has the opportunity to respond to and critique the ideas presented in Nicholas’ text; he is able to use aspects of nationalism to displace Nicholas’ settlement ideals. He does this most obviously by offering class as an indicator of national belonging, and by suggesting that Nicholas’ model is easily corrupted by its inclusion of lower class settlers.

Both writers however share a desire to marginalise other groups which threaten the nationalism of the new site. The indigenous Māori population is dealt with in ways which reduce their threat to British settlement and allow them to be subordinated into a British colony without disrupting national homogeneity. Their ’otherness’ is both made prominent and reduced in an attempt to maintain homogeneity by establishing Māori inferiority, justifying their displacement by

European settlers.

Aside from race, ideas of class and propriety are also invoked by both authors to present other European settlers in New Zealand such as the itinerant whaling and sealing communities as harmful to future nationalism, and therefore worthy of exclusion from the model of ideal settlement.

This marginalisation shows how it is not just race that produces “others” but ideas of behaviour and culture. Those Europeans that lived relatively free of the laws and customs of nineteenth century

Britain are thus dismissed as degenerate and external to ideas of proper “Britishness”.

Because of these similarities, these competing utopian visions converged in a Hegelian dialectic, influencing later authors such as Samuel Butler who responds to the ideas of both. 46

Jonathan Lamb writes that the official reaction to the Wakefield scheme was the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. This is partly true, but the Treaty itself did not halt New Zealand Company settlement;

Wakefield’s book describes another four years of settlement in New Zealand after 1840. The Treaty could be read as a victory for the missionaries and the Crown though, as they gained the exclusive right to buy land from Māori. This combined with the official governance of New Zealand by

Britain means that from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, utopian themes in New

Zealand form a hybrid between New Zealand Company utopianism and the official egalitarianism of the CMS. The influence of capitalist utopianism, nationalist preservation, and indigenous exclusion carry on into the texts of my next chapter, albeit in differing ways. 47

Chapter Two: The Late Nineteenth-Century Response.

By the late nineteenth century, the European settlement of New Zealand that Wakefield and

Nicholas were writing about was not finished in either a literal or ideological sense. James Belich writes that between “1831-81, the European population of New Zealand increased by 50,000 percent” (MP 278). This mass wave of settlement, introducing new groups of people, contributed to further speculations about the future of the nation and the ideology of the settling population.

Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and Julius Vogel’s Anno Domini 2000 (1889), are two texts which were written during this wave of migration and reflect some of the changing approaches to utopian settlement in New Zealand. Both texts continue the idea of projecting New Zealand settlement in both nationalist and utopian terms, though their ideals and definitions vary.

The ongoing historical developments of modernity continued to provide material for the

New Zealand utopian project. As Britain changed, the New Zealand utopian tradition changed too which maintained the reflexive approach of imagining the colony always in relation to modernity.

Equally so, writing emerged that actively engaged with previous utopian projections of settlement, and in doing so contributed to the utopian discourse.

Erewhon functions as a response to settler utopianism that satirically imagines the conflation of all of the conflicting projections of settlement with each other as well as with the new developments of science, industry and religion. By placing utopian ideals in conflict with each other, Butler demonstrates their incompatibility and antinomy, as well as the contradictions present in individual settlement ideals, especially the idea of British replication. The satirical voice allows

Butler to examine the assumptions of utopian settlement and present them in a way that is defamiliarised and unsettling to the contemporary reader. In this sense, Erewhon functions as a form of critical utopia, suggesting other possibilities beyond the established tropes of settler utopianism. 48

Butler’s satire relies on an unreliable narrator from which it is difficult to decipher his own voice, making Erewhon appear as a multi-layered vision of contradictions and incompatibilities, creating an estranged and defamiliarised version of New Zealand in which conflicting utopias construct an uneasy nationalism.

Anno Domini 2000 is significant because despite being published nearly twenty years after

Erewhon, it continues the process of imagining found in the first chapter that Butler was responding to, demonstrating the resilience of settler utopianism despite criticism and changing historical contexts. Vogel’s text imagines a future New Zealand as it would look if he were able to shape it according to his own political beliefs. Self-interest and national interest intersect seamlessly in the the text’s suggestion that New Zealand settlement would become a genuine, ideal utopia under capitalism and open-ended modernisation. The dynamism of Vogel’s writing serves as a response to

Butler’s problematising, suggesting that development and progress would eliminate the problems of replication and incompatibility. Vogel’s confidence is underlined by his didactic style that in contrast to Butler’s satire, reveals a genuine belief in the ideals of settlement.

The shaping of the nation is central to both texts, and both attempt to address the processes involved with utopian nationalism. The boundaries of inclusion and exclusion established by

Wakefield and Nicholas are re-assessed or reinforced depending on the utopian ideals of each author. Vogel’s utopian nationalism stems from his inclusion of women in the body politic, where

Butler’s attempt to further the national project comes from his questioning of nationalism as a reliable path to utopia.

The framing devices of each text are useful in order to analyse how these texts approach the utopian tradition. Erewhon is presented as a satire, portraying a version of New Zealand settlement that is an anti-utopian projection rather than ideal. The book was not written initially as a whole piece, and was instead assembled around articles that Butler had written in the decade leading up to 49 the novel’s publication. Butler admits in his 1901 preface that the episodic nature of the final product is due to this writing process. “The Book of the Machines” was first published in The

Press newspaper in 1863, followed by the “World of the Unborn” and sections on the musical banks several years later. “These four detached papers” remained detached until someone suggested he

“string them together into a book” (Butler, Erewhon 34). This creative process means that Erewhon is not a consistent satire of any single subject, but rather several satirical ideas combined into one narrative, complicating the prospect of identifying one singular aim in the text. Nevertheless, there are elements of the novel that can be isolated and examined, and the role of the narrator as unreliable filter is one of the key ways that Butler frames his text. In Erewhon the narrator is employed as an intermediary between the reader and Butler as a way of satirising not only the utopian projection, but the expectations of settlement that accompanied Butler and his contemporaries in New Zealand. The text is presented as having been written by a narrator

(unnamed in the first book but referred to as “Higgs” in Erewhon Revisited), who, like Butler, is an

English farmer in the South Island of New Zealand. In many ways he functions as a satire of writers such as Wakefield who attempted to show how personal wealth could be increased in New Zealand.

The traits of idealistic settlers are amplified in Higgs in order for him to be a satirical mimic of their beliefs. By having a figure such as this as narrator, the entire record of Erewhon is further shrouded in doubt, creating a comment on the accuracy of other texts about the state of New Zealand settlement.

Higgs’ traits are set up early in the text, making his motives easy to understand. He states that his initial motivation for moving to the colony is to “better [his] fortunes more rapidly than in

England” (Butler, Erewhon 39) and his primary motivation for relaying the story of the discovery of

Erewhon is because he will “profit by it, will bring [him] a recompense beyond all money computation, and secure [him] a position such has not been attained by more than some fifteen or 50 sixteen persons, since the creation of the universe” (39). Higgs is reminiscent of many settlers whose personal utopian projections form the basis for settlement.

Higgs is not merely an agent in the way that Wakefield was, he is also a settler expecting utopia, a customer of the New Zealand Company, or a reader of official literature on the country.

The expectations of settlement, especially under the influence of utopian advertising are reflected in

Higgs’ initial dissatisfaction with colonial life in New Zealand. Farming life becomes

“monotonous” (42) for Higgs and this leads to a desire for greater prospects: "I could not help speculating on what might lie further up the river and behind the second range. I had no money, but if I could only find workable country, I might stock it with borrowed capital, and consider myself a made man" (43). While money is a motivator here, more strong is the desire to find something more fantastic and in fact more utopian than the monotonous colony, despite the fact that the scenery was

“the grandest that can be imagined” (42). This echoes Butler’s own experience of New Zealand;

James Smithies summarises Butler’s disappointed reaction to Canterbury as a feeling of being

“thrust into a rather boring, alien environment” (Smithies 208). This kind of disappointment is often an antecedent for the “colonial sublime” found in in much New Zealand literature. Mary Louise

Pratt writes that the “disappointments of what Columbus failed to find: China, the Great Khan, the massive cities and endless roadway” (127), lead to its replacement with the sublime, the aesthetic value of nature as a compensation for marvels not found. Patrick Evans adds that this gives the sublime “a bitter-sweet quality, a negative-within-the-positive” (Forgetting 59). Higgs does not give up on his expectations, craving antiquity “(precious in a new country)” (Butler, Erewhon 46) and admits that having “kindled his imagination” (48) he intends to search for the utopia he expects.

During the journey that eventually ends in the discovery of Erewhon, he dreams of a "golden city"

(59) on the hill, a pre-conceived idea of utopia recalling American colonialism and John Winthrop’s famous speech lodged in his mind. 51

Butler conflates the colonial sublime with Higgs’ romantic descriptions of Erewhon and its inhabitants as a form of romantic sublime:

Their expression was divine; and as they glanced at me timidly but with parted lips in

great bewilderment, I forgot all thoughts of their conversion in feelings that were far

more earthly. I was dazzled as I saw one after the other, of whom I could only feel that

each was the loveliest I had ever seen. (79)

Higgs sublimation of Erewhon is evident in this passage, shown by Butler’s language, using words such as “divine” and “dazzled” to demonstrate how overwhelmed Higgs is by the sight. The

“earthly” feelings that Higgs describes and the naivety he attributes to the subjects reinforce the romantic depiction, echoing Nicholas and Wakefield’s approach to Māori. This establishes Higgs’ initial expectations of positivity when approaching Erewhon, which makes his later reassessment more disturbing to the reader’s expectations and ideals. Higgs is initally satisified but quickly finds that the new place creates disturbing conflicts in his own ideals.

Higgs too is established as something of a narcissistic nationalist, another chance for satire especially when he is met with Erewhonian nationalism. His romantic view of the Erewhonians underlines not only his search for the sublime, but displays a condescending attitude regarding his own national identity. His attitudes towards Chowbok, his guide over the mountain and a contrasting indigenous analogue to the Erewhonians, are an earlier and more extreme version of

Higgs’ attitudes which demonstrate Butler’s awareness of the various ways that indigenous people were excluded through representation. Chowbok is described as having a “grotesque fiendishness” in his “very ugly” (Erewhon 47) appearance, and who is also “impenetrably stupid” (63). These categorisations and descriptions echo earlier descriptions of Māori and show Butler’s intention to 52 examine the nationalist and chauvinist attitudes of settlers towards Māori, which he also satirises when discussing Erewhonian customs which I will also be looking at.

The interaction between Higgs and Erewhon forms the main aspect of the satire in the text, formed through the way his expectations are met in uncanny ways. This is demonstrated when examining the anti-utopian aspects of the novel. Higgs’ characterisation allows Butler to create total estrangement from the land of Erewhon by having a less-than-ideal narrator and settler confront a projection of settlement that reflects the wishes of this kind of settler in ways that reveal its inconsistencies and flaws. This allows Erewhon to be read as an attempt to interrupt the contemporary mode of settler utopianism and its nationalist ideals.

Julius Vogel’s Anno Domini 2000 (1889) is a much more easily interpreted text because it is framed around Vogel’s own well documented political ideals. The unintentional aspects of Vogel’s text become more important because of this knowledge of his intent. Like Butler and his narrator

Higgs, Vogel was a New Zealand settler too. He was born in England, and his interest in emigration was based on personal gain, moving to New Zealand via Australia, seeking his fortune in gold in both colonies. He later moved into journalism and politics, and was the founder of the Otago Daily

Times newspaper in 1861, promising it to be a “symbol of progress” (Dalziel 36), a term which came to characterise his political career. He held two terms as Premier between 1873 and 1876, and during these terms attempted to put into action his belief that “the progress of a country could be judged by the prosperity of its citizens” (Dalziel 82). He subsequently took out large government loans to pay for infrastructure such as railways in order to grow New Zealand’s economy. This investment was not intended to reap immediate benefits, instead “rising land values, larger markets, extended settlement, and increased production would more than compensate for the cost” (81) in the future. As its name implies, Anno Domini 2000 is set 111 years after its initial publication, in a New

Zealand where the investment in colonial infrastructure is responsible for a prosperous and peaceful 53

New Zealand. Vogel’s utopia manifests out of his own desires, in this case the realisation of a New

Zealand based on the success of his political policies. Vogel’s vision for New Zealand demonstrates how much settler utopianism was still a prominent part of settlement, and just how much Vogel’s writing is a reflection of this prominence.

Vogel was also trying to entice investment in New Zealand with this text, much like

Wakefield before him, in order for his model society to be created, leading James Belich to describe him as one of New Zealand’s “colonising crusaders” (MP 279). Thus the text can be seen to be aimed at potential settlers, just as Wakefield’s was, in an attempt to present to them a vision of the future that encourages settlement and emigration. Hence in Anno Domini 2000, early settlers are not only promised incredible future wealth, but also become prominent and famous figures of history

Where Erewhon is aimed at questioning the values of settlement then, Julius Vogel is invested in reaffirming these values and presenting a positive image, which is reflected in his text.

Despite the considerable difference in intention between Butler and Vogel, it is remarkable the number of similarities their utopian visions share. Both place an emphasis on their version of settlement as being able to provide wealth and prosperity to all citizens, as well as health and wellbeing. These tropes are the most basic ones also employed by Nicholas and Wakefield in my previous chapter. Julius Vogel mentions that in the future New Zealand, “destitution was abhorrent”

(87) and that no subject of the empire suffers for financial reasons. Similarly, the initial descriptions of Erewhon focus on the abundance of resources and food that Higgs notices. He writes of the country being "highly cultivated, every ledge being planted with chestnuts, walnuts, and apple trees" (Butler 80), and later observes "a profusion of delicious fruit" (98).

This wealth and abundance has recognisably altered the people of the respective utopias.

Higgs’ initial reaction to the Erewhonians is to "say that the people were of a physical beauty which was simply amazing" (79). Vogel describes his protagonist as "fair to look at in both face and 54 figure" (40) and other characters as "beautiful...grand" (44), "exceedingly muscular" (55) and

“possessed of immense strength and power of endurance” (51) amongst many other descriptions of this type.

These similarities demonstrate both how acutely aware Butler is of the tradition he was satirising, and how Vogel was perhaps unaware of how much these tropes were overused to the point that they invited satire. What differs radically across these texts is both the intentions of the authors, as well as the processes that they present as being responsible for the shape of their imaginary imagined communities.

In Erewhon, Butler conflates various conflicting utopian ideals in order to speculate the effect of utopian settlement on a future nation. The overarching conflict of Erewhon is the problem of utopianism itself, specifically its acceptance and rejection of various aspects of modernity in order to imagine a better world. In this sense, the text functions as a critical utopia, or anti-utopia in its presentation of a far-from-perfect world, where utopian ideals are able to be examined to understand their effect on a functioning society. Erewhon fulfils a crucial role in the New Zealand utopian tradition by questioning utopian settlement in itself, foreshadowing the redirection of later texts, showing how “utopia and anti-utopia support each other; they are two sides of the same literary genre. They gain sustenance from each other’s energy and power” (Kumar, Utopia 253).

The competing aims of previous settlement schemes as well as the intentions of later settlers leads to this conflict being played out in New Zealand at the time Butler was in the country. James

Smithies notes this in his article “Return Migration and the Mechanical Age: Samuel Butler in New

Zealand 1860–1864” observing that Butler was in New Zealand at a time when the modern world was most starkly contrasted with the natural: 55

It can be noted that he was living in a nascent colonial society where pastoralism

undoubtedly reigned, but where modernity was impacting with obvious and increasing

force: few places in the world could have offered a more stark reminder of the complex

relationships between nature and technology. (212)

The effect of this stark meeting on Erewhon is seen in the way that Erewhonian culture accepts some and rejects other developments of modernity, in a logical though uncanny manner for the narrator Higgs. The adherence of the Erewhonians to modern science and especially Darwinism is the most prominent aspect of this. Butler read Origin of Species while he was in New Zealand, and was clearly heavily influenced by it, inspiring articles such as “The Book of The Machines” (1863) which later became chapters of Erewhon. Thomas Huxley’s work is also important to Butler’s writing, as it proposed the arbitrary nature of human development as circumstance rather than improvement (as opposed to Lamarckian theory). The theory, which reduced the development of humanity to purely mechanical reaction and environmental circumstance becomes the basis for an

Erewhonian awareness or belief in relativity. Thus Erewhonian culture dictates that the status quo must be maintained, in order to prevent contingency from affecting their current state of development. In his essay “The Idea of Utopia in New Zealand” Jonathan Lamb makes clear this relationship between Erewhon and Darwin. He writes of Erewhon as a place in constant fear of change and displacement, hoping to preserve itself “on a pinnacle of civilisation...frozen in the form it had acquired 600 years earlier” (82-83). Erewhonian philosophy reflects this:

Time walks beside us and flings back shutters as we advance; but the light thus given

often dazzles us, and deepens the darkness which is in front. We can see but little at a

time, and heed that little far less than our apprehension of what we shall see next; ever

peering curiously through the glare of the present into the gloom of the future, we 56

presage the leading lines of that which is before us, by faintly reflected lights from dull

mirrors that are behind, and stumble on as we may till the trap-door opens beneath us

and we are gone. (Butler 167)

It is clear that the Erewhonians are fearful of the unknown effects of the future. Hence they live on a forced stasis, trying to maintain the status quo, and avoiding change and competition. The image of a utopian future represented by the dazzling but gloomy future is reminiscent of Plato’s cave analogy. Butler is implying that the preservation of the present occurs because utopia is too difficult to comprehend, and is ultimately frightening. The relation to utopian settlement is clear here, where

Butler satirises the preservationist approach of writers such as Wakefield. As Alex Calder notes,

“local conditions must produce difference” (108), and the fear of this difference is what the

Erewhonians are desperate to counteract, in order to maintain their sense of self and ideals.

The desire to protect themselves against the unknown effects of the future makes the

Erewhonians similar to the versions of utopian settlement that seek to protect the home country’s nationalism by preserving it in a new space. This is put to its extreme in Erewhon, where nationalism becomes a religion that enforces conformity to national customs, and in doing so functions as a tool of preservation and maintenance. The religion of “Ydgrunism,” concerns the worship of the goddess Ydgrun, whose name is an anagram of Grundy, and whose primary purpose is to enforce normative behaviour. Grundy of course refers to Mrs Grundy from Thomas Morton’s

Speed the Plough (1798), an unseen character whom the other characters fear upsetting. This reference signifies Butler’s transposition of English traditions to the colony in a way that reverses them and distorts their original meaning. Butler explains how central Ydgrun is, when he says that she “is in reality their great guide, the mariner’s compass of their lives” (156). 57

Ydgrunism is a paradoxical religion however because it enforces convention and conformity, but its most ardent followers end up transcending it because in their constant competition to adhere most closely to national ideals, they end up evolving beyond the wisdom of their peers. Through absolute conformity, the High Ydgrunites (as Higgs labels them) are able to become embodiments of the positive aspects of Erewhonian nationalism, and inadvertently transcend the bounds of conformity which govern their practice. This is demonstrated when Butler writes that they “would never run counter to her without ample reason for doing so: in such cases they would override her with due self-reliance” (157). The High Ydgrunites are able to look at Erewhonian society in a detached fashion, aware of its inconsistencies, but unwilling to change it “unless for some greater good than seems likely to arise from their plain speaking” (158). They are aware that the conventions of Erewhonian society which Ydgrun enforces are the very forces which have allowed them to embody positive nationalism, and to undermine the belief of lesser Erewhonians would destroy this path to higher consciousness. It is also implied that the High Ydrgunites come to embody negative aspects of Erewhonian culture. They are hypocrites, in that they practice

Ydgrunism while openly disavowing it; they are jealous and competitive, which is what presumably motivates their progress, and they are vain and hubristic in their eventual disavowal of her. I disagree with Sue Zemka when she writes “High Ydgrunism is a response to cultural relativism that turns inward, retrenching behind an admittedly compromised but romantically defended image of hierarchical English cultural authority” (461) and assumes that this is Butler’s genuine response to cultural relativism. Instead we can see when Butler writes:

they had most of them a keen sense of humour and a taste for acting. The example of a

real gentleman is, if I may say so without profanity, the best of all gospels (158), 58 that Butler is arguing for the constructedness of all nationalism. “A taste for acting” is proof of this awareness, and the raising of nationalist ideals to a level above godliness is an act of hubris. Butler is both satirising the attempt to locate in New Zealand a space for the preservation of idealistic nationalism as well as the views of his narrator who holds the High Ydgrunites in high regard because he is a narcissistic nationalist himself. This responds to writers such as J.L. Nicholas who present religion as integral to nationalism and civilisation. When nationalism and nationalist conformity become a religion and an ideology held above all others, the various, potentially conflicting aspects that combine to create different subjective versions of national identity become enhanced and are forced to exist side by side. This is how Erewhon becomes a nation of confused utopianism as it absorbs all of the versions of utopian settlement that Butler was aware of and combines them and preserves them through conformity, to uneasy effect. Instead of preserving an idealised nation in the way that Nicholas and Wakefield propose, the Erewhonians preserve the conflicts of settlement.

The conflation of nationalism with religion precedes the replacement of traditional religion in Erewhon with capitalism. This functions as the conflation of Nicholas’ religious ideals and

Wakefield’s capitalist vision for New Zealand. The Musical Bank is a satire of the Anglican church, and is attended due to Erewhonian conformity, but because of the influence of capitalism on New

Zealand settlement and thus also on Erewhon, it takes the form of a bank that issues currency. The musical banks are described as empty, large cathedral-type places, where people exchange pseudo-cheques for pseudo currency, but are intentionally conspicuous when undertaking their banking. The currency’s “commercial value was nil, but all of those who wished to be considered respectable thought it incumbent upon them to retain a few coins in their possession and let them be seen from time to time in their hands and purses” (Butler 143). Higgs’ companion at the bank, Mrs

Nosnibor informs him that the bank pays out only every thirty-thousand years, and the last payout was only two thousand years previously, meaning people “preferred investments whereby they got 59 some more tangible return” (141). The bank (or rather church) is preserved as an aspect of imported culture as Erewhonian custom demands, but is portrayed as pointless in a capitalist system, showing the effect of modernity on a particular aspect of preservationist utopianism.

The capitalist incursion into national culture becomes more acute when Higgs notices how self-interest is revered in Erewhon and misfortune is punished: “misfortune generally...is considered more or less criminal” (Butler 112), while “if a man... does any other such things as are criminal in our own country, he is...taken to a hospital” (102). Rather than being “weak and contrived”

(Smithies 217) as James Smithies believes, this inversion of English custom signifies how the personal becoming public in Erewhon also means that self-interest becomes national interest, and personal misfortune becomes public misfortune. Those that are unlucky and fail to thrive in utopia are punished, removing them from the national body, while those who are criminals, especially with relation to self-interest and improvement are treated for their crimes as if they were an illness. The

Erewhonian fear of external competition leads to ruthless internal competition which Higgs finds disturbing, despite being a reflection of his own desire for greater fortune.

The Erewhonian punishment of unfortunate people results in physical illness also being treated in Erewhon as a danger to national well-being. The Erewhonian equation of the national body with the personal body creates a custom of nationalist exclusion based on health and sickness, because the national body is the same as the personal body:

It is said by some that our blood is composed of infinite living agents which go up and

down the highways and byways of our bodies as people in the streets of the city. When

we look down from a high place upon crowded thoroughfares, is it possible not to think

of corpuscles of blood travelling through veins and nourishing the heart of the town?

(Butler 206) 60

Their national definition is that of the body politic: “The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history” (Anderson

26). Because of this conflation, Erewhonian national culture reflects a desire to keep the national body as healthy as possible by excluding its physically weakest members. Higgs notes “This what I gathered, that in that country if a man falls into ill health, or catches any disorder, or fails bodily in any way before he is seventy years old, he is tried before a jury of his countrymen, and if convicted is held up to public scorn and sentenced more or less severely as the case may be” (Butler 102). In order to preserve and strengthen their nation, the Erewhonians enforce a form of natural selection for utopian belonging. Though it may seem to be unsettling to Higgs and the contemporary reader, the influence of utopianism and Darwinism on Erewhon enforces this and justifies its strangeness.

Just as Wakefield and Nicholas justify displacement of Māori and the rejection of other settler groups because they are perceived as inferior and thus harmful to utopian construction, the

Erewhonians exclude the sick and weak for the same reasons. Butler is satirising the logic of national exclusion by presenting it in a form that challenges other values of settlers.

The utopian ideal of a modern New Zealand with great industry and capitalist prosperity is also rendered problematic in Erewhon by the meeting of nationalist Darwinism and the fear of mechanization. The industrialisation of Britain that Wakefield and Nicholas use as a reason for expansion is combined with the influence of Darwinism to effect a fear of machine rule over people. Technology is feared by the Erewhonians because the mechanical explanation of evolution means that if humanity is a construct of its environment, and consciousness just a feature of adaptation, then machines are also able to evolve beyond their current states into something that would control humans, denying humans their freedom. Here, an extract from “The Book of the

Machines” explains the theory: 61

But returning to the argument, I would repeat that I fear none of the existing machines;

what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very

different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time past made so

rapid a movement forward. (Butler 202)

Taking James Smithies’ article in mind, we can see that the “The Book of the Machines” has a significant relation to New Zealand settlement in a concrete rather than merely abstract way.

Smithies makes the connection between Darwinism and Victorian machine theory and their influence on Butler’s own writing. Drawing on Erik Olssen, he describes Victorian Machine Theory as a recognition of the machine as symbolic of the fundamental disruption that industrial mechanization caused in nineteenth century English society. Characterised as “vaguely malevolent”

(Smthies 216), machines were seen as responsible for the eradication of an older culture to make way for the new. “The Book of the Machines” serves as a point of disruption between the twin aims of progression and arcadia in New Zealand settlement. The confluence and incongruity of two modern ideas – Darwinism and mechanization – manifests in Erewhon as permanent agrarianism, where “they seem to be five or six hundred years behind Europe” (Butler 75). Despite Erewhon’s religion being based on a form of capitalism, they are unable to fully modernise because of their own fear of displacement. The fundamental incompatibility found internally in the schemes of the

New Zealand Company of a fear of industrialisation mixed with proposed utopian industry is shown to create a nation of contradictions.

If Anno Domini 2000 is read as a response to Erewhon, Vogel’s text emerges as an attempt to resolve the problems that Butler proposes, becoming another antinomic response in the New

Zealand utopian tradition. Indeed, instead of presenting the conflation of utopian ideals as problematic, Vogel attempts to blend previous utopian ideals into a functioning and idealised future 62

New Zealand. Thus nationalism, capitalism and industry, and scientific progress are presented as complementary ideologies rather than conflicting as they are in Erewhon. This establishes a new aspect of the dialectic for writers such as John Mulgan in my next chapter to react against and question. The idea of progress in particular is key to Vogel’s text, and in this sense his text functions in harmony with Erewhon where terminal stasis and preservation is seen as potentially harmful compared to progress and development. Where Butler is satirical, Vogel is almost stilted in his earnestness, resulting in a pompous style of text which is reminiscent of Wakefield’s confidence.

This shows the strength of belief in the ideals of utopian settlement despite interruptions such as

Erewhon.

Vogel’s utopia attempts to transcend the boundaries of contingency that make Erewhon appear so backwards, by reinstating the faith in modernity to advance the efforts of the British colonial project. His utopia is based on continuing the process of expansion and modernisation that brought the settlement project to New Zealand in the first place, whereby teleology is embraced rather than contingency feared. The mantra of Anno Domini 2000's New Zealand is “progression, progression, always progression” (35). An obvious contrast with Erewhon comes in Vogel’s approach to technology. Where the Erewhonians’ fear displacement, Vogel suggests the capacity of humanity would increase as technology does. As machines become more advanced, so too does the wealth of New Zealand. Vogel writes:

As the capacity of machinery and the population of the world increased production, the

theory of the need of labour could not be realised unless with a corresponding increase of

the wants of mankind; and that instead of encouraging a degraded style of living, it was

in the interests of the happiness of mankind to encourage a style of living in which the

refinements of life received marked consideration. (37) 63

The growth of technological capability would increase consumer demand, ensuring humanity would always maintain dominance over machines. Mechanization in Vogel’s text is an enabler of dynamic progress, rather than a threat. While Butler’s text is satirical, Vogel’s response is nevertheless an attempt to steer the utopian tradition towards a progressive rather than regressive model.

Vogel’s optimism regarding technological development allows him to revive the vision of

New Zealand’s abundant resources that Wakefield and Nicholas established. For example, in Anno

Domini 2000, gold is hypothesised to exist in large quantities in the river Clutha and so through private investment, massive mechanical river works are built to divert the flow of the river so that the gold may be retrieved from the dry river bed. It is of course a success and “the gold appeared to be inexhaustible” (Vogel 124). Vogel’s vision of increasing want is boundless and potentially unsustainable so he relies on the tropes of utopian settlement to justify his optimism. The seed for this imagining grew out of the recessions of the late nineteenth century and his unsustainable borrowing while Premier would lead to further government debt rather than growth. Hence, the prosperity the future enjoys is an attempt to justify contemporary investment in large scale public works.

Vogel’s materialist emphasis responds to contemporary socialist utopias such as American

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and the British vision of William Morris’ News From

Nowhere by suggesting that national prosperity would come from neither of their antinomous socialist ideals, but instead from capitalism and imperial dominance. Especially in contrast to

Morris, Vogel identifies materialism as key to imperial utopianism. Raewyn Dalziel suggests federation of the empire was based on this kind of market dominance: “The imperial relationship was one of mutual advantage. It gave Great Britain prestige, markets, strategic positions, outlets for its surplus population; New Zealand gained security, access to British Finance, colonists, and markets” (178-179). In Vogel’s vision, the growth of capital would ensure the constantly improving 64 condition of the British Empire and the elimination of suffering. He writes: “It had long since been decided that every human being was entitled to share in the good things of the world, and that destitution was abhorrent” (87). He continues: “It was also recognised that the happiest condition of humanity was a reasonable amount of work and labour” (87). Here the purpose of Vogel’s endless progression becomes apparent. The happiness of humanity depends on the ability to constantly work towards the acquisition of greater material income in an endless cycle of unrealised fulfilment.

To ensure that no citizen is left wanting, the state pays a minimum pension to all who want it, though they are punished for being idle by having to wear a humiliating uniform. Thanks to the dignity of the settlers, very few are inclined to take this option. Instead, through work and ambition, the bar of minimum prosperity is continually rising, and people are inclined to labour:

It was at first argued that such a system would encourage inaction and idleness; the State

would be deluged with pensioners. But subtler counsels prevailed. Far-seeing men and

women argued that the condition of the world was becoming one of contracted human

labour; and if the viciously inclined refused to work, there would be more left to those

who had the ambition to be industrious. ‘But,’ was the rejoinder, ‘you are stifling

ambition by making the lowest round of the ladder so comfortable and luxurious.’ To

this was replied, ‘Your argument is superficial. Survey mankind; and you will see that,

however lowly its lowest position, there is a ceaseless, persistent effort to rise on the part

of nearly every well-disposed person, from the lowliest to the most exalted.’(Vogel 88)

Vogel is clearly wary of the socialism of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887) which was a bestseller in New Zealand at the time and an undoubted influence on Vogel’s writing. For Vogel the

“equality of possession was an impossible and indeed undesirable ideal” (36) because “it would be fatal to energy and ambition, two of the most ennobling qualities with which human beings are 65 endowed” (183). Instead of this, capitalism is the preferred economic system to encourage ambition and thus progress, however ambiguous that may be. Vogel’s didactic style is fed by the determinism of his ideology. When he writes “your argument is superficial” he assumes a position of superior knowledge, and the determinism of the next line justifies this position. This establishes a clear addition to the utopian dialectic, which will bring reaction from later writers such as John Mulgan.

Because of the minimum level of comfort afforded to even “the lowliest class” (Vogel 89),

“the accumulation of wealth became a more honourable ambition and a pleasanter task when it ceased to be purchased at the expense of the working class” (90). In fact, capitalists in Vogel’s future are the most powerful, and yet the most generous members of society. It is they who are responsible for the transformation of the world. The prologue of Anno Domini explains that in the early twentieth century, the state of world economics was such that great inequality befell the people of the empire. The exemplar of this is the story of Londoner George Sonsius who, poverty stricken, is killed by a baker for stealing bread. In response, “the fierce spirit of discontent which for years had been smouldering burst into flames… a bold and outspoken declaration was made that every human being had an inherent right to sufficient food and clothing and comfortable lodging”

(26-27). The wealthiest financial houses of the world hold a conference in response to this declaration in order to remedy the situation. Here Lord de Cardrosse pompously explains the role of these financial houses in the future world:

‘I need scarcely say,’ he began, ‘that I am deeply sensible of the compliment you pay

me in asking me to preside over such a meeting. We in this room represent a living

power throughout the globe, before which the reigning sovereigns of the world are

comparatively helpless. But because of our great strength, it is undesirable that we

should work unitedly except for very great and humane objects. For the mere purpose of 66

money-making, I feel assured you all agree with me in desiring no combination, no

monopoly, that would pit us against the rest of the world.’ (Vogel 31)

Capitalism is the governing ideology in Vogel’s future, rendering financial houses more powerful than nation states, but instead of abusing this power for their own gain, Vogel invests his capitalists with a desire to work towards the benefit of the empire, and British nationalism. By describing the reigning crowns as “helpless” compared to the powerful wealthy, Vogel is suggesting a massive shift of power due to modernity and capitalism, which New Zealand can be at the spearhead of. To avoid “riding headlong into anarchy” (Vogel 32) the financial houses decide it is in their interest to provide a minimum level of material comfort to the masses. This again is in contrast to the contemporary context in Britain and New Zealand, where the conditions for some workers were akin to sweat shop labour. Vogel tries to entice people to emigrate to New Zealand with promises of wealth, and so a system that proposes not to reward its capitalists would not be cohesive with this plan. Most significantly, Vogel presents a refined version of Wakefield’s utopianism, whereby capitalism is encouraged and essential to colonisation, but New Zealand is also to be the site of universal prosperity and upward social migration. As his utopia is both an attempt to encourage investment in New Zealand, and to fulfil the utopian political ambition of a poverty-free New

Zealand, he attempts to marry two seemingly incompatible principles of capitalism promising grotesque wealth as well as universal prosperity for all citizens. The myth of the trickle-down effect is seemingly relied on, and the contradictory benevolence of competitive capitalists choosing to share rather than retain their wealth.

A unified imperial nationalism is one of the most prominent ideals in Anno Domini 2000 and is another way that Vogel attempts to redirect settler nationalism to avoid the failings of Erewhon.

Vogel suggests settler nationalism would be in actual fact better served as imperial nationalism, 67 where British Imperial power is shared equally between its constituent nations. More importantly though, Vogel’s text shows how settler national identity would not be altered by the effects of expansion; colonial British identity would be synchronous with that of the home country through the cultural and political union that Federation promised. The union is in reality an extension of nationalism, and its continuance and homogeneity is ensured by “the condition that the federation was irrevocable and that every part of it should fight to the last to preserve the union” (Vogel 39).

This is an attempt to mitigate the distance of settlement, as well as ensure that the situation of preservationist stagnation found in Erewhon is replaced by national development and mutual benefit. The fear of change and adaptation that Butler satires is replaced in Anno Domini 2000 with a dynamic approach to nationalism that allows for change but in an imperial rather than local sense.

This federation also creates the conditions for totalitarianism however, through an absolute repression of imperial rebellion. An example of this is an attempt by Australia to cede from the union. At the request of the Emperor, Hilda infiltrates a secret meeting of Australians discussing whether or not to cede. Once it is agreed that they should form their own empire, Hilda reveals herself and springs the trap that was set for the conspirators, electrocuting them with “a shock of magnetic electricity, the effect of which was to throw them into instantaneous motionless rigidity”

(Vogel 99). The condition of absolute loyalty to imperial federation not only maintains synchronous nationalist development, but suggests a totalitarian restriction of its subjects’ liberty at the same time, if not viewed from a nationalist angle. This is reminiscent of Frédéric Rouvillois' statements about the relationship between utopianism and totalitarianism:

The proximity is too frequent to be accidental. Utopia and totalitarianism are both engaged

in a mirroring game, tirelessly sending the same image back and forth as if utopia were

nothing more than the premonition of totalitarianism and totalitarianism the tragic execution 68

of the utopian dream. Only the distance that separates a dream from its realization seems to

stand between the two. (316)

Vogel’s vision is caught between the two ideas, rendering his own vision problematic.

Totalitarianism undermines the dynamism he argues for and replaces it with imperial oppression.

This would seem to revive Wakefield’s claims of local independence against distant oppression, showing that Vogel does not adequately answer all of the problems of previous utopian ideas, with the theme of totalitarianism continuing in later texts such as Smith’s Dream.

Vogel’s capitalism for the working classes and unified imperial identity indicate a couple of aspects of his attempt to define community and identity for the settler nation. The inclusion of women in the national community is, however, his most significant contribution to the utopian dialectic. One of Vogel’s political ambitions was to see women receive voting rights in New

Zealand. It was his belief that it was both sexes right to participate in the interests of the nation.

Vogel believed that “women were the power behind the throne” (Dalziel 268) anyway, and so their representation in politics would only serve to benefit the nation, to avoid exercising “power without responsibility” (268). Hence, women as the “other” need to made part of the nation to subdue the threat they pose. In Vogel’s text this is also utopian, as women in the year 2000 have far more rights than their nineteenth century counterparts and we can see this through the success of the protagonist

Hilda Fitzherbert, who is a member of parliament for New Zealand. Her family is from a long line of “distinguished statesmen – a word it should be mentioned, which includes both sexes” (Vogel

40). Written in 1889, this is a progressive if not radical stance that Vogel takes, and many have made mention of the fact that by the year 2000 in New Zealand, women did hold all of the major positions of political power. The inclusion of women as part of the political economy of the nation is an important part of New Zealand utopianism that is often highlighted as an example of New 69

Zealand’s progressive history. However, Vogel’s text demonstrates the limits of his own imagination by presenting a still limited role for future women and suggesting that they require development before their political role can be proved useful. The condescension of Vogel is apparent here: “the progress of woman in all pursuits requiring judgement and intellect has been continuous; and the sum of that progress is enormous” (36). To a contemporary reader of Anno Domini 2000 this would seem to be suggesting that women were inferior until given the chance to improve. Because this progress is open ended, and the progress of men is simultaneously occurring, women will always be subordinate to men in some form. This proves to be the case, although it is found that “the mental power [is] larger in woman,” man is still “the executive force of the world” (36). This sentence seemingly contradicts further aspects of the text such as the fact that the prime minister of the empire and the leader of the opposition are both women. As it transpires though, the real power lies with the male emperor, and thus there is still a patriarchal hegemony controlling the empire. Male succession is a predominant theme throughout the text, and is only resolved in the final pages where it is agreed that females should have as much right to succession as males. While this brings about equality in terms of ultimate power, it is only justified because the Emperor’s son is sick and weakly, and disinterested in power, whereas the daughter is more suitable for the throne. Vogel is unable to fully invest in women an equality that does not threaten the masculine dominance and ideals of his imagined Empire.

The role of women in Erewhon has not been widely discussed, and is potentially ambiguous.

Women are presented as being the objects of Higgs’ desire, with little agency of their own. Owing to the unreliability of the narrator, it is hard to decide whether this is an aspect of Butler’s writing or a deliberate sexist and exploitative aspect of Higgs’ personality. For example Higgs is very quickly infatuated with one of the first women he meets in Erewhon: Yram. He is shown to use any tactics necessary to get what he wants, and so feigns pity: “remembering pity’s kinsman” (Butler 86) in order to elicit affection from Yram. This works and Higgs admits his pleasure at the thought of 70 being “petted and cosseted by Yram” (89). Yram is promptly forgotten about though when Higgs travels to the metropolis and instead transfers his affection to Arowhena. Yram is only mentioned once more in the entire text of Erewhon. Higgs’ self-absorbed approach to romance is certainly highlighted, but it is difficult to determine if this is Higgs’ objectifying women, or Butler unconsciously demonstrating his own gender politics in an attempt to demonstrate the unscrupulous personality of Higgs with relation to his own gain. Higgs has already been shown to only be interested in furthering his wealth and fame, and for Butler, women may be just another object for

Higgs to attempt to gain possession of. Apart from the role of Yram as mayoress in Erewhon

Revisited women are portrayed as having largely no agency and willing to become subjugated by

Higgs. Peter Mudford writes of Butler’s “fear of women” as being central to the “impoverished” (9) way he writes of women in his texts, and this would indicate that Butler is unconsciously echoing the colonial objectification of earlier writers, rather than satirising their opinions. This leads me to conclude that although Higgs is selfish in his romantic endeavours, Butler is not at the same time trying to expose the inequality that women faced in nineteenth century Europe and New Zealand.

The focus of Erewhon on the distorted images of England’s social order do not extend to any significant focus on women’s rights.

Butler’s focus is instead on exposing the racial inequality of New Zealand colonialism and the chauvinism of most British settlement plans. Chowbok, or Kahabuka, “a sort of chief of the natives” (Butler 45) is clearly analogous to a particular Pākehā image of Māori. Higgs learns that a group of terrifying statues is intended to ward off any of Chowbok’s people from entering Erewhon.

The Erewhonian culture of self-preservation predicates cultural vanity, and it is for this reason that

Chowbok’s kind are excluded from Erewhon because they “would be too ugly to be allowed to go at large” (96). An earlier practice of the Erewhonians even involved capturing “the ugliest of

Chowbok’s ancestors whom they could find, in order to sacrifice them in the presence of these 71

[statues] and thus avert ugliness and disease from the Erewhonians themselves” (96). This practice can be read as Butler’s critique of the supplanting nature of Wakefield settlement, where even in the official scheme Māori were intended to live on native reserves and remain separate from Europeans.

In practice, the scheme was even less accommodating; Māori were forced off land in illegal land sales and excluded from the utopian benefits of the new settlement. The justification for this treatment of Māori was the perceived superiority of Europeans, as demonstrated in my first chapter.

For Higgs, the threat of not asserting settler nationalism against an indigenous presence means an admission of similarity with the “other” and potential loss of self identity and assurance.

As Butler unconsciously prevents women from disturbing his own homosocial presumptions, he satirises these same attitudes when directed at indigenous people. Erewhon Revisited (1901) displays this theme when Butler examines the process of cultural translation, and the profound effect that hybridisation can have on identity. Higgs’ confidence in his own superiority is witnessed in Erewhon in his desire to convert the Erewhonians to his own way of life. Upon speculating that the Erewhonians may be one of the lost tribes of Israel, Higgs decides “I would certainly convert them” (Butler, Erewhon 76), and “I would have set about converting them at all hazards had I seen the remotest prospect of success” (157). In this context, Higgs clearly believes in his own religious superiority and is confident in the rightness of conversion. The effectiveness of missionaries in New

Zealand, and the confrontation of colonial mimicry becomes the subject of Erewhon Revisited, when Higgs revisits the Erewhonian people. To his surprise, Erewhon is much changed, and the influence of Christianity is evident. Higgs’ first visit influences the new religion of “Sunchildism” that we find has taken over Erewhon upon his return. The religion is very similar to Christianity, and is based on what the Erewhonians learnt from Higgs:

I may add further that as a boy my father had had his Bible well drilled into him, and

never forgot it. Hence biblical passages and expressions had been often in his mouth, as 72

the effect of mere unconscious cerebration. The Erewhonians had caught many of these,

sometimes corrupting them so that they were hardly recognisable. Things that he

remembered having said were continually meeting him during the few days of his second

visit, and it shocked him deeply to meet some gross travesty of his own, or of words

more sacred than his own, and yet be unable to correct it. (Butler, ER 33)

The fact that Higgs’ should see the Erewhonians’ use of his sayings as a “corruption” is evidence of

Higgs’ displaced Eurocentricism and subsequently adjusted nationalism. Higgs’ shock indicates the displacing effect that the Erewhonians’ mimicry has on Higgs’ sense of self. For Sue Zemka this mimicry has the effect “of depriving an imperializing culture of stable authority and claims to authenticity” (458). The Erewhonian subversion of Christianity undermines its stable indivisibility.

By appropriating aspects of Christianity, the Erewhonians act the role of the European, and undermine the barriers of cultural difference which Higgs relies on for his claims to authority. Homi

K. Bhabha too writes of the “profound and disturbing” (123) effect of mimicry, and how it reveals the ambivalence of colonial desire. On the one hand “the narcissistic demand of colonial authority”

(126) seeks the colonised subject’s acquiescence and acceptance of the dominant culture’s institutions. On the other hand, the appropriation and mimicry of these institutions articulates

“disturbances of cultural, racial and historical difference” (126) that reduces separation and authority. The response for Higgs is contained in the quoted passage too. By describing their use of scripture as a “gross travesty” Higgs re-establishes a separation between himself and the

Erewhonians, by excluding them from European, English, and Christian belonging. In this context, where Erewhon once again represents Māori-European relations in New Zealand, Butler shows a nuanced view of the continued subjugation of Māori despite the rhetoric of equality. The effect of

Māori mimicry is captured well by Te Kooti’s Ringatu church, which Jonathan Lamb describes as being “a potent threat to Pākehā self-confidence between 1868 and 1872” (97). As with New 73

Zealand Māori, the Erewhonians do not simply accept a new culture as superior to their own, and do not absorb or interpret new ideas directly but rather translate them into their own culture. The story of Higgs’ original time spent in Erewhon is shrouded in mystery by the time of his second voyage twenty years later, and Higgs overhears the professors arguing about aspects of his escape and agreeing to purposely misinterpret some aspects. One instance of this is their argument as to whether horses or storks were present at his escape, when Hanky says “... but they were black and white storks, and you know that as well as I do. Still they have caught on, and they are in the altar-piece, prancing and curvetting magnificently, so I shall trot them out” (Butler, ER 72). This minor admission, amongst others demonstrates the Erewhonians ability to purposefully misremember Higgs’ original visit to match the new collective memories that their religion and national culture is based on.

To counter the disruptive effect of the indigenous “other” within national boundaries in

Anno Domini 2000, Vogel simply imagines a future without indigenous presence. There is even very little reference to colonies where the indigenous population far outweighs that of the European such as India. Instead, the “white” colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada are mentioned frequently and play a major role in the action. This exposes an attitude in the official government version of New Zealand utopianism (that Vogel represented), in that the supposedly equal treatment of Māori that the Treaty was supposed to ensure was potentially just a precursor to absolute settler dominance. The Treaty’s promises were undermined by the Crown’s land confiscations which led to the Land Wars, only just won by the colonial government’s forces with the aid of other Māori groups. Despite the very real possibility of losing this war, European victory went some way to restoring a sense of superiority. Following this, the paternalism displayed in Nicholas’ text and the

“civilising” project that it depicted was carried on after the signing of the Treaty. The intention to eventually Europeanise Māori until there was no distinct Māori culture existed side by side with the 74 fatal impact trope, expecting a total Māori capitulation to European culture. Belich writes “the view that Māori were a dying race persisted to 1930” (MP 174) because it helped to “project the British

Empire into New Zealand” (178). Hence Vogel’s version of the future is one of a purely European

New Zealand without bi-culturalism. There is an afterword to the text written by Vogel which makes a small mention of colonised peoples, and further attempts to justify cultural and ethnic superiority. He writes:

The theory of forcing a person to labour would be no more recognised than one of

forcing a person to listen to music or to view works of art. Of course it will be urged that

natives of countries where the earth is prolific are not, as a rule, industrious. But this fact

must be viewed in connection with that other fact that to these countries the higher aims

which grow in the path of civilisation have not penetrated. (183)

Here he explains the difficulty of forcing indigenous people to assimilate into the settler economy, but implies that with the “penetration” of further “civilisation,” this will no longer be a problem.

Vogel is expressly stating that his utopia is for settler nationalism only, and only possible through the displacement of any Māori cultural values. These values are deemed as incorrect by Vogel, where Māori are not “industrious” because they do not fit with a European idea of industry, similar to Wakefield and Nicholas’ views.

The way that these two texts reflect the ongoing tradition of speculation and exclusion demonstrates a level of engagement with a tradition of writing that is now established. Higgs’ plan, of selling ideas of a utopian community in order to raise money for the discovery of this (fictional or not) community are reminiscent of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s plan to sell the idea of an already extant utopia in order to raise the capital and personnel to realise this utopia. Butler had experienced 75 the residual effect of Wakefield’s scheme first hand, because he had moved from England to live in

Canterbury Settlement, a settlement intended to function like a New Zealand Company one.

Erewhon can justifiably be seen as a comment specifically on the transplantation of English values to New Zealand, and of the effects of attempting to construct a society based on extreme adherence to these values. Erewhon initiates the anti-utopian line of thinking seen in Janet Frame’s Intensive

Care, of utopia as a dangerous wish that creates unforeseen problems in its blind implementation.

Erewhon reflects many of the cultural institutions of Victorian England and colonial New Zealand, but the mirror distorts them and conflates them in such a way that their function becomes dislocating rather than familiar. Jonathan Lamb points out that opposition to Wakefield was also

“deeply suspicious of any system of social improvement that supposes a direct correlation between intention and outcome” (90-91). That is, the utopia as imagined may become transfigured by the unknowability of the future. Butler too reveals in this contorted dream vision of Erewhon the limits of utopian thinking. Higgs’ projection is stuck between the “free play of imagination in its indefinite expansion” and the “obligations of the law binding and closing a place with insuperable frontiers”

(Marin, Frontiers 403-404).

There is also a sense of the Romantic about Erewhon, in a desire to find something essential in nature that is beyond the obscurities of modernity and its institutions. Butler attempts to reveal the hypocrisy and pointlessness of cultural norms when they are manifested in new contexts. Butler however does not reach far beyond satire to reveal anything of his own views, except to perhaps advocate a search for a more “authentic” or “essential” sense of self beyond nationalism. Butler reveals a clue as to his views in the early stages of the text when he writes “Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only” (Butler, Erewhon 51), for when Higgs sees the realisation of his own nationalist fantasies, he becomes aware of their flaws. As Sue Zemka writes:

“Like so many wishes answered in legend, Erewhon taunts the wisher, reflecting back the fatuous elements in the narcissistic dream image that his desire projects” (449). 76

Vogel’s response attempts to reclaim the emptiness that Erewhon reveals by suggesting the answer lies in the future, and not in his contemporary society, though he too seems to admit he has no answer for ultimate human contentment, opting instead for a continuous euchronian version of fulfilment. He admits this futility in the opening stages of the book:

‘It amounts,’ he said in a tone of profound conviction, ‘to this: the ills under which the

masses suffer accumulate. There is no use in comparing what they have today with what

they had fifty years ago. A person who grows from infancy to manhood in a prison may

feel contented until he knows what the liberty is that others enjoy. The born blind are

happier than those who become blind by accident. To our masses the knowledge of

liberty is open, and they feel they are needlessly deprived of it. Wider and wider to their

increasing knowledge opens out the horizon of possible delights; more and more do they

feel that they are deprived of what of right belongs to them.’ (32)

This passage demonstrates the relative nature of Vogel’s proposed utopian New Zealand. As long as

“the horizon of possible delights” keeps expanding, there will always be a sense of unreachable satisfaction. New Zealand and the Empire may be responsible for a great advance in material wealth for all Britons, but the idea of inequality creating endless ambition points to an infinite sense of dissatisfaction for those with less, an ongoing subordination that is confronted by John Mulgan’s

Man Alone and Robin Hyde’s Wednesday’s Children in my next chapter. The situation they inherit is one of assumed British identity and a belief in the endless prosperity possible through the union between colony and empire. 77

Chapter Three: Revision and Redirection in the 1930s.

In the 1930s, many writers, under the influence of international modernism, attempted to redefine New Zealand nationalism in a cultural as well as sociological sense. John Mulgan’s Man

Alone (1939) and Robin Hyde’s Wednesday’s Children (1936) attempt this nationalist redefinition while also responding to the settler utopian tradition. The influence of colonial utopianism is still evident in the 1930s nationalist project, showing how utopianism remained a prominent part of this era, despite the aesthetic and ideological changes that the period had on New Zealand writing and western literature in general.

Mulgan’s text attempts to redefine settler utopianism and national identity in opposition to earlier definitions, especially of the era Julius Vogel was writing in. Imperialism is presented as a hindrance to national development in Man Alone, and is rejected in favour of localised identity, which Mulgan identifies as masculinist and proletarian. From this definition, a new utopian vision is born which addresses the problems that beset both masculinism and proletariat welfare in New

Zealand. These themes reveal the influence of American and British modernism on Mulgan’s writing.

Robin Hyde’s text published earlier than Mulgan’s, attempts to expose the exclusion of other national voices from Mulgan’s mode of nationalism and its antecedents, implying a continuity between masculinist cultural nationalism and what it aimed to replace. She does this by offering a critical utopian vision, lacking in programmatical structure, but instead designed to show the negative aspects of the strict demarcation of the boundaries of national belonging that Mulgan portrays as authentic. Instead, Hyde re-settles New Zealand’s literary landscape, favouring a liminal, unstructured and inclusive version of nationalism. 78

In both texts however, the nationalist utopian tradition can still be seen, whereby the trope of settlement remains foregrounded, with the nation and its direction yet to be fully determined or developed. Despite attempts to widen the boundaries of New Zealand nationalism, the mode of writing that places settler identity as central prevails in these texts, and both form a utopian vision that in some way continues the colonial utopian project. They also attempt to place New Zealand as a site with the ability to be distanced from the effects of modernity on the rest of the western world, showing the strength and permanence of this tradition in New Zealand literature, and its ability to remain integral to even the utopian imaginings that attempt to look beyond its boundaries.

To understand partially where Hyde and Mulgan were writing from the influence of international modernism needs to be accounted for. The early twentieth century saw the increasing prominence of modernist literature, an attempt to represent experience and totality necessitated by, but often external or oppositional to the turbulent flux of modernity. Modernist art, including literature was varied and any attempt to define it simply is still contentious. However, we can state with certainty that it gave rise to a wide range of aesthetic and stylistic innovations that in all their variety encapsulated an attempt to understand and redirect the effect of modernity on the human subject.

Literary modernism in particular enacted a symbolic destruction of past values and identities in an attempt to self-define in an authentic way. Fredric Jameson writes, much modernist art turned out to be “a text, whose reading proceeds by differentiation, rather than unification”

(Postmodernism 31). This sense of differentiation is evident in Mulgan’s and Hyde’s work. The rejection of imperial rule and identity evident in both writers’ texts enacts a redirection of previous

New Zealand literary projects. Both attempt to write a new re-settlement of New Zealand that rebuilds the experience of settlement from outside the bounds of established convention. Roland

Schaer claims that for the modernists, “the time had come for a relentless antagonism between the 79 future and the past; the new, a value in and of itself, could come forth in all its radical purity only from the destruction of the old, in a violent break that would separate the old world from the one that was clamouring to be born” (278).

However, modernism also displays a conservative streak, where the “make it new” catchphrase captures a “creative and recursive temporality at work in modern aesthetics... where innovation is always a kind of renovation” (Castle 18-19). Hence it can be argued that the attempt to imagine a settler utopia is not necessarily made redundant by the influence of modernism, but rather redirected. The influence of modernism seems merely to be renovation of the existing tradition; an attempt to more accurately convey the message rather than reject it outright.

The form and style of both of these texts reveal essential aspects of the ways in which

Mulgan and Hyde approach the utopian tradition. Because of the importance of aesthetics to modernism, each authors’ style reveals their method for imagining utopia as well as where they place themselves in relation to nationalism. The New Zealand literary scene of the 1930s provides us with perhaps the governing reasons for the difference between these texts, in both form and content. If we accept that modernism is concerned with self-definition, then the fact that the most visible form of literary modernism in New Zealand was largely nationalist too comes as no surprise, given the importance of nationalism to the settlement project. Mulgan himself is often associated with a group of male writers who collectively aimed to create a new literary nationalism in New

Zealand. The cultural nationalist group with which he was associated included poets such as Alan

Curnow whose 1930s poetry has been described as beginning from a point of “aggressive nationalism” (Murray 223). Frank Sargeson is also frequently associated with Mulgan, and his

“realist, nationalist, and provincial sketches” (Wevers, Hist. Of NZ Lit. 265) help to provide clues as to one literary tradition Mulgan was influenced by. This nationalism was often extremely masculinist; these writers identified the previous generation that they sought to displace as 80

“effeminate and fanciful” (Evans 144). They were later labelled the “high masculinists” by Kai

Jensen in his study Whole Men (1996).

It is important to note also the criticism of earlier writing for being “fanciful”, as Evans points out. Cultural nationalist writing makes its claims to truthfulness and realism central to the nationalist project. This style of writing was a reaction to the “flowery” Georgian prose that the cultural nationalists identified as false and inauthentic. Kai Jensen writes that “the rising group of male writers saw most previous New Zealand literature as precious, flowery, sentimental, socially naïve and out of date” (Jensen 42). Man Alone thus offers a masculine rendering of New Zealand, from the point of view of an English soldier moving here after the war. He travels through the country registering and documenting the conditions of life. The materialist experience is always subjectively masculine however, and so any claim to empirical truthfulness by way of materialist realism in Man Alone is always mediated through this lens. The claim to truth and the influence of masculinism is pervasive as the following passage demonstrates:

He got up and poured some cold water from the jug into a basin. Outside he could see a

street of warehouses lined with vans and drays being loaded up. The sun was shining

from over behind the hotel and there was steam coming up off the pavements, still wet

from last night’s rain. He washed his face with cold water and rinsed out his mouth. The

water in the carafe smelled bad so he drank from the bedroom jug instead. He rang a bell

that hung down beside the bed. After a while, when nothing had happened, he rang

again. A girl put her head round the door. (15)

This seemingly innocuous passage reveals much of what Man Alone claims to represent. There is a steady accumulation of visual detail here that excludes emotional description, presenting instead a

’neutral’ picture. This demonstrates why C.K. Stead describes the tone of Man Alone as “cool, 81 neutral and steady” (164). Claims of Mulgan’s authenticity derive from such neutrality. The repeated use of the pronoun, however, betrays the subjectivity of this documenting as we are only provided with Johnson’s masculine perspective. Any version of nationalism that Johnson represents is going to be based on this singular comprehension rather than a sense of truly objective representation. Similarly, the utopia that can be constructed from this view point is always going to be androcentric and exclusive.

The women writers that were excluded and criticised by cultural nationalism included Robin

Hyde. Her long term exclusion leads Michelle Leggott to place Hyde as one of a “lost matrix of women poets whose presence in our literature needs urgent reappraisal” (267). Because of the narrow masculine focus of the cultural nationalists, nearly all accounts of Hyde’s contribution to

New Zealand literature focus on her treatment by other contemporary male authors. Stuart Murray writes, “the nervousness with which so many of the male writers of this period viewed their female counterparts often spilled over into personal attacks or critical indifference, and it was Hyde who was the chief victim of an emerging orthodoxy that grew increasingly misogynistic and doctrinaire”

(166). Rather than accept cultural nationalist dominance however, Hyde consciously reacts by writing in a style not in keeping with cultural nationalist doctrine.

This is why Wednesday’s Children is written in an arch, magical style in comparison to Man

Alone. This is a deliberate move by Hyde one would have to assume, given that her novels Passport to Hell (1936) and Nor The Years Condemn (1938) which deal with a male protagonist are written in a style much more hospitable to cultural nationalist concerns, perhaps as a redirected attempt to penetrate cultural nationalist assumptions. Hyde’s novel attempts to represent in both content and form, an awareness of the constructedness of some experience and identity, and how this can be used to provide a utopianism outside of the governing framework of hegemonic cultural reality.

That is, the didactic nationalism of Hyde’s male contemporaries which tries to dictate the mode of feeling and experience of New Zealand is refuted through an alternative representation and the 82 construction of alternative imagined possibilities, especially for women and other groups marginalised by cultural nationalism.

Hyde establishes her position early in the text, when she describes the perfect reader as “the man who knows a bit, and can believe or imagine much more” (WC 14). The text is pointed at the cultural nationalists it would seem, exposing “the man” as unable to believe beyond his limited scope of nationalism. The form that Hyde employs attempts to show how subjective the cultural nationalist realism is, by demonstrating the subjectivity of imagining in general. The opening page of the novel demonstrates the distancing that Hyde attempts to demonstrate:

At precisely 7.30 on the night of June 22nd a small woman in a fur coat entered the

advertising department of a newspaper office (The Comet) in the city of Auckland, New

Zealand. There are still some Flat-Worldians, or, as Swift called them, Big-Endians, who

have not yet been trained by crossword puzzles, the increasing strangeness of politics, or

the mystery of the League of Nations (which is so rapidly replacing that of the Holy

Trinity in modern life), to use their imagination. To these, such a statement as the above

will convey nothing. (13)

This opening paragraph expresses where Hyde positions herself in the established nationalism of

New Zealand as well as newer cultural nationalism. The realist-style sentence that opens the paragraph is shown to have no effect on the mainstream readership, which lack the ability to look beyond the text and use their imagination to see more than “a small woman in a fur coat”. This can be seen as an attack on realist cultural nationalism and its inability to demonstrate possibilities beyond description. Hyde’s mention of contemporary world events seems to indicate that she is writing from a time of change, and that those “not yet... trained”, who are condemned as hopelessly old-fashioned “Flat-Worldians” and “Big-Endians” (referring to the changing of egg-breaking traditions in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726)) will eventually be forced to confront the world 83 transformed by modernity. This new world gives rise to modernist texts attempting to make sense of the change. The complacency of those who are part of the old order is instead manifested as indifference:

The clerks showed no interest in her. But there are thousands who would not be

interested if in the city a sea-lion should walk up to them and offer them a flipper, with

that mannered charm of which sea-lions are capable. “Stunt they would think, only that

and nothing more.” (16)

Those who are unable to imagine are ignorant to the possibilities of change. In particular, sexist marginalisation creates the conditions for radical rethinking. For example, there is a pointed reference to cultural nationalist sexism contained in this passage, in the reaction to a seal-lion’s handshake being to call it a “stunt”. Allen Curnow’s description of Hyde in the 1960 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse as hysterical and exhibitionist (Murray 168) echoes this characterisation.

Pierre Bourdieu writes of this kind of criticism as being central to male domination, where women because of a “denial of their existence (are often forced) to resort to the weapons of the weak, which confirm the stereotypes - an outburst that is inevitably seen as an unjustified whim or as an exhibition that is immediately defined as hysterical” (59). When Curnow defines Hyde as such, he is immediately assuming and accepting the role of dominant male, and exposing the limitations of a masculine literary tradition – the exclusion of female voices.

The only “readers” who can see beyond this construction of women are those also marginalised by mainstream society. For example, while Wednesday is ignored by those inside the office, a drunk outside is able to recognise the

great rosy and crystal wings [that] unfold behind her head. He saw the lissome slightness

of Wednesday’s body, and how it could dance like a mad shepherdess, who is 84

nevertheless at heart so respectable that she might easily induce Pan to wear pants. He

saw Wednesday girt about with symbols, corn-sheaves, stout doves and olive branches.

(18)

Wednesday represents to other marginalised people, a symbol of reconciliation with their own existence. Her “crystal wings” would imply something angelic in this description, with Wednesday already above the level of existence that marginalises others. Here, the necessity for imagining is made evident. Those within the dominant hierarchy are not compelled to imagine better possibilities for themselves, but instead help to maintain the status quo. The marginalised, for example the drunk outside the newspaper office, are aware of the need to imagine something beyond their own oppression, to express their fantasies because these dreams are not represented by the culture and system that oppresses them. The form and style of Hyde’s writing can thus be seen as reactionary to cultural nationalism, and is designed to show the limitations and exclusions that their mode of writing necessitates.

Hyde also aligns herself with a lineage of writers who also use fantastic visions to subvert the dominant modes of their contemporary society. She refers to Lewis Carroll (WC 46), Miguel

Cervantes (172), Jonathan Swift (13) and Laurence Sterne (275) among others to help the reader place Wednesday’s Children in a long line of writers willing to use fantasy or imaginary projections to illustrate the peculiarities of their own socio-historical context. She also places an emphasis on writers with dislocated backgrounds such as Sterne and Swift who were Anglo-Irish, Rainer Maria

Rilke (118) who left Prague and travelled extensively through Europe, and Humbert Wolfe (270) who was born in Italy but lived in England, to provide a history for her own attempt to understand social belonging in the face of dislocation, in her case, the European settlement of New Zealand.

This cross-textual referencing indicates how much Hyde is attempting to redefine nationalism while also invoking the influence of the past to illustrate her position. 85

Because both Hyde and Mulgan define the nation in a different way to previous writers, and each other, they also need to show how previous ideas of nationalism fail the group which they identify as being central. Much as the writers of the first chapter attempt to place their own concerns as central to New Zealand settlement, so too do Hyde and Mulgan attempt to show how competing versions of settlement have failed. In Mulgan’s text, the influence of Ernest Hemingway is hugely important in this regard. When Mulgan writes to his father of having sold a novel, he described it as a “sordid Hemingwayesque sort of book” (Letters 147) and the stylistic influence is obvious.

Importantly it also points towards the naturalist themes of the novel, something which Paul Civello posits as central to Hemingway’s writing. Paul Civello writes that the aftermath of World War One

“presented humanity with a material universe stripped of the comforting moral and spiritual order with which Christianity had formerly imbued it” (67) arguing that Hemingway addresses this in his novels, by describing the human environment as one of chance and adaptation, rather than divine privilege. Mulgan adapts this approach in Man Alone to demonstrate the spiritless domain that

Johnson moves in, to justify the need for re-direction. A key moment when this occurs is after the

Queen Street riot scene, in Johnson’s escapes on a cargo train. His only company is a homeless man, who despite his drunkenness manages to describe the world that Johnson moves in:

‘This is the end, brother,’ the old man said tonelessly. ‘This is the end. Where is Christ

now? There are no men with us, no good men now, no Seddon, no Massey. There is no

Christ, no Calvary. They are not with us.’ (MA 68)

The solutions of the past, from Christ to Seddon and Massey are no longer sufficient in the fractured modernist world. From the spiritual order of Christ to the older generation’s political ideals, older attempts to imbue the chaos with order are rejected as insufficient. 86

Transporting Hemingway’s model to a New Zealand context allows Mulgan to theorise that the utopian ideal of transplanted settlement is another relic from the past insufficient to realise utopia in the post-war world. Mulgan instead reveals an approach to settlement based on Darwinian principles that alienate the settler from the landscape. Here, Mulgan seems to be addressing the same issues as Samuel Butler in Erewhon, describing a need to adapt to surroundings rather than attempt to maintain some kind of idealised stasis. The Darwinian natural world is overwhelming in

Man Alone, where Johnson is subject to the material environment, having his actions dictated by it until he reaches crisis point. Mulgan’s naturalist approach involves establishing the New Zealand environment as no longer beneficial to settlement, and instead almost hostile, repelling utopian projections. Stenning’s farm in Wairarapa is an example of this, where the edges of the property

“rose sharply in bush” (87) and a neighbouring farm has been fully reclaimed:

‘That’s a bit the fire missed,’ Stenning said, as they went past it, along the river flats.

‘There’s the remains of a farm over there.’

It was true, though all Johnson could see was a corner of the iron roof of the house

between trees. The fields that had been cleared were smothered head-high in fern and

scrub. (87)

This passage is in stark contrast to the writing of J.L. Nicholas and E.J .Wakefield, reversing the idea of the landscape as being capable of fostering utopian settlement. These scenes allude to the plight of returning First World War soldiers too, when the government granted them land that was insufficient for farming, symbolising the initiation of a masculine battle with land. Almost all of the work that is undertaken by Johnson on his tour of the country is affected by the environment in this way. In a work camp, “after a day’s rain, mud and damp seemed to swallow everything” (46), and in the Waikato, going into the hills is compared to going into a desert where “---- all grows” (26). 87

The natural environment is at its most dangerous to Johnson in the scenes leading up to

Stenning’s death and the famous ’man alone’ chapters based in the Kaimanawas. These scenes animate the naturalist “theme of a divided self torn between rationality and animality, often expressed through the plot of the “brute within” breaking through the veneer of civilization and overpowering the “better self” (Campbell 501), as well as Mulgan’s “othering” of women and

Māori. Johnson works on Stenning’s farm where Stenning and Stenning’s Māori wife Rua are his only company. Rua represents a version of nature that is hazardous to Johnson. Her figuring as

’natural’ is evident; her equation with the natural world also designates her as dangerous to Johnson.

She is ill adapted to domestic living: “the house as a whole looked dilapidated and dirty. There were unwashed dishes piled in the scullery, the butter was badly made, saltless, and full of water” (MA

78). She tends to instead drag “about the house, as a rule, in a soiled frock, the neck torn and open, her hair unwashed and uncombed, in downtrodden slippers” (93). In a non-domestic environment however, Rua is comfortable and poses a seductive threat to Johnson. She kisses Johnson one day, leaving him “bad-tempered with himself” (106) at being unable to control his natural behaviour.

This eventuates in a sexual encounter while working on the edges of the farm. Johnson’s puritanical self-repression is matched by the language Mulgan chooses, writing instead of overt sexual language that Johnson and Rua “lay together on the sand” (108), after she finally seduces him against a backdrop of “warm and soft” river sand, under the “summer sun” near the “cool and green” river (108). Rua is clearly metaphorically linked to this landscape: “the light brown of her body was very pure and natural looking” (108). Mulgan clarifies whose interests are at stake in this scene: “Taking it all in all, he reckoned this was Rua’s day” (109). Stenning on the other hand represents a brutal side of humanity. He is described as “ugly, thick set, and slant eyed” (112), with a “great thickness and strength of his forearms and legs” (74). A final encounter between Stenning’s brutality, Rua’s dangerous seduction, and Johnson’s repressed animal side eventually results in 88

Stenning’s death and Johnson’s exile into the bush. The confrontation occurs when Stenning confronts Rua and Johnson and a fight ensues. The physical encounter between Stenning and

Johnson is an animalistic struggle of brute strength, until Stenning is killed by his own gun. Johnson is then forced to flee into the dangers of the bush, knowing that Rua “had probably dared such a situation as this” (121).

The natural world harbours the dangerous “other” of women and Māori who pose a threat to

Pākehā settlement. Rua’s figuring as natural is both because of her gender and her race. While it is

Rua who is the crux of this “other” figure, there are further instances in the text where Mulgan signals his exclusion of these two groups. Mulgan’s portrayal of women is established with the description of Johnson’s earlier love-interest Mabel as “a mean woman” (43) who Johnson “forgot about” (24) when another opportunity arose. This indifference compared with the male relationships in the novel suggests women form part of Johnson’s environment but are not agents in the way males are. Similarly, the other Māori described in the novel are presented as environmental figures rather than part of the nation. Rua’s family seem to materialise at Stenning’s farm, where they are described as “an odd, cheerful, shiftless lot, as careless as gipsies” (93). The terms chosen by

Mulgan signify their relation to Johnson; they are “odd” and therefore “other”, imbued with a naïve and “natural” cheerfulness, and a shiftlessness which is at odds with Johnson’s ascetic drive. Lastly, the comparison to “gipsies”, that great amorphous group without their own nation, suggests a lack of belonging and national identity. Though Rua’s family are not a threat to Johnson, they provide us with clues as to how to read Rua, as an environmental element which eventually threatens Johnson’s safe settlement.

Mulgan’s addressing of New Zealand settlement is not restricted to redefining humanity’s role in nature. He also rejects the role of capitalism in the foundation of settler nationalism and argues the failure of that ideology to realise utopia in New Zealand. Instead of placing capitalism as central to utopia as in Anno Domini 2000, Mulgan identifies it as a cause of suffering, 89 demonstrating his Marxist politics. Mulgan’s Marxism is largely derived from his English surroundings. His immediate environment was the literary scene of Oxford where he worked for the

Oxford University Press (OUP), working with W.H. Auden on more than one occasion including editing the left-wing poetry anthology Poems of Freedom (1938). The left-wing influence of people such as Auden, combined with the effect of the Great Depression means that Man Alone focuses heavily on the economic situation of New Zealand workers, and the effects of imperial capitalism on New Zealand nationalism. Mulgan was certainly interested in the ramifications of imperialism, and his part in a formation of a club at Oxford intended to explore “Empire Policy” is testament to this. He writes in a letter to his parents in 1934 of this club, and how the “Imperialistic leanings” of the chair “rather antagonised people” (Letters 59). Man Alone demonstrates Mulgan’s increasingly leftist political views, channelled into a distrust of the capitalism of the British Empire.

Mulgan characterises New Zealand settlement as being based on failed capitalist ideals.

Fredric Jameson describes “the imperialist dynamic of capitalism proper” (Modernism and

Imperialism 46), as the need to expand into further territories for labour and resources and to keep these territories from other competing imperial powers. Mulgan utilises this kind of theory, describing the aim of many settlers as being profit based, and self-interested: “Everybody wanted to buy a farm sooner or later in New Zealand. You didn’t buy a farm and build a house and grow pine trees round it to stay there, but to sell it to somebody else and live on the profit” (MA 21). The utopianism of Vogel and Wakefield is shown here to be responsible for the alienation of the settlers from each other. There is no intent to build lives and acquire ownership over space, rather a rootless

(and ruthless) desire to make quick profits. This fails when depression hits however. For example,

Johnson’s first employer in New Zealand is Blakeaway, stuck on a farm that he had hoped to sell in order to join the “easy life” (21) in town. Unfortunately he is stuck on his farm as property prices have fallen, moving the easy life out of reach. The capitalist system is failing those who attempt to 90 succeed within it and all New Zealanders are stuck in a depressed system controlled by external forces.

The next phase of Man Alone focuses on the effect of the depression on New Zealand’s workers. This is when “the good years… when everyone had money” (39) end, and the effect of failed capitalism truly hits Johnson. Mulgan writes of “the temper of the country changing… the luck had turned…people grew uneasy and careful with each other, and kept to themselves, watching and saving what they had” (42). Hayden White describes Marx’s description of “the division of labour” as being key to the anti-utopian aspect of capitalism, and Mulgan attempts to show this in his text. The division of labour creates a severance in society which divides humanity rather than uniting it against “nature”: “What had been before unified, in both consciousness and praxis, is now divided; and mankind, formerly unified within itself against nature, is now severed within itself into two kinds of producers, and therefore into two kinds of consumers, and, as result, into two kinds of humanity, two classes” (White 302). This division of humanity obviously contributes to the naturalist theme in the novel, while also presenting New Zealand as the colonial proletariat of a distant British bourgeoisie.

This characterisation is particularly pronounced in the depression sequence of Man Alone.

Johnson becomes increasingly alienated from his labour as the depression lingers on. He is forced into “wet, cold, miserable work” (43) if there is pay to be had. After spending time homeless,

Johnson and Scotty are forced into a labour camp, where the “uselessness of the work” (45) begins to wear them down. Men are forced to work for little or no wages building a road that might “when there was ever money to metal or concrete it, be a tourist road around the country” (45). Johnson is removed from his labour; He is not working for himself but instead maintaining the economic system that is failing him. For Marx, this objectification is indicative of a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie treat the proletariat purely as a commodity, and in

“industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe” 91

(Marx and Engels 16; ch. 1 par. 26), the proletarian, be they colonial or metropolitan is “an appendage of the machine” (Marx and Engels 21; ch. 1 par. 37).

Once again, the form of the text, as with much modernist literature, points towards Mulgan’s

Marxist intentions. Man Alone can be described as a picaresque text because of the peripatetic nature of the narrator and this is an important form because it helps to foreground Mulgan’s Marxist intentions. The picaresque tradition of the roguish narrator gradually mutated from its 16th century origins so that by the 20th century, the narrator could be more neutral. The picaresque mode would often let the author “disclose the crimes and corruption of those [the narrator] came in contact with”

(Sieber 59). Thus the picaresque became “the autobiography of a ‘nobody’ and his adventures in a

‘repressive’ society” (74). This device is used in other twentieth century texts, such as George

Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) in which the narrator’s travels allow him to show “the wastefulness and stupidity of a system which condemns men to the useless expending of energy” (Sieber 66-67). The Orwell comparison further underlines the influence of Marxism and shows how the picaresque device is employed by Mulgan to expose a Marxist reading of New

Zealand, just as Orwell uses it for a socialist examination of Wigan, Paris or London. As Terry

Eagleton writes, for Marx and Engels, overt political commitment is not necessary; “the author need not foist his own political views on his work because, if he reveals the real and potential forces objectively at work in a situation, he is already in that sense partisan” (Marxism and Lit. Crit. 47).

Hyde’s portrait of an existing or developing New Zealand nationalism examines a division in national subjects not along strictly economic lines but rather attitudes towards settlement. Hyde suggests that two forms of settlement co-exist in New Zealand, one organic but marginalised, the other ’official’ but sterile and inauthentic. The official bourgeois nationalism of Wakefield and

Vogel is presented as an oppressive and exclusive hegemonic power in Wednesday’s Children, and one which restricts the ability to imagine utopia rather than ensure it. Michelle Elleray’s article

“Turning the Tables: Domesticity and Nationalism in Wednesday’s Children” claims that “the 92 domestic redirection in Hyde’s novel in turn enacts a nationalist politics that seeks to place New

Zealand rather than Britain at the centre of settler subjectivity” (31). It certainly does seem that this is Hyde’s intention, describing Anglocentric settlement as restrictive and ill-adapted, and invoking domestic description as signifying this. Near the end of Wednesday’s Children we are given this description of the Gilfillan dining table, made of,

red wood, not white, and so much care was expended on it every day that it almost had a

soul. Certainly it had a personality. It was more important in the household, for instance,

than a stray cat or a serving-girl.... At the moment the Gilfillan table, white linen islands

attracting attention to the rest of its shining nakedness, seemed to Mr Bellister to draw

the clan together as pitilessly as the chalk circle of the Chaldean sorcerer fastened djinns

and afreets into position. Anxious faces, discontented faces, lonely faces. (281-282)

Here the table represents “the values of the Gilfillan household: conservative solidarity, social hierarchisation, pervasive anglophilia” (Elleray 30) and becomes a symbol of the restrictions of the household. The reference to “djinns and afreets” makes clear the restriction put on imaginary possibilities in this kind of society which are instead replaced by static boundaries. Those who are not privileged are ruthlessly excluded; the servant girl holds as much importance as a stray cat, indicating the exclusion of working class voices from this society, who hold as much importance as stray animals. This is reminiscent of Hyde’s earlier description of the sea-lion as woman, and also

Mulgan’s figuring of women and Māori as an environmental “other”.

Most importantly to Wednesday’s Chidren however, the sexism of this tier of settler culture is what determines a need to redirect nationalist energy. Brenda Gilfillan, Wednesday’s sister-in-law represents the acceptable version of female power within this part of society. She does wield a certain amount of domestic agency, but this is subordinate to a more powerful patriarchal structure, 93 and social convention. She is led to think she has constructed her own world: her butler she “very nearly created”, the house “the whole of it… was Brenda Gilfillan’s doing” (28), and “she had also made Pamela… and Ronald” (27-28). However we see that Ronald, Brenda’s husband, has her

“under his thumb, far more than she realises, poor old girl” (41). Her agency is an illusion, and for all her attempts to construct her own world, she is still trapped in the framework of the male dominated Auckland bourgeoisie. Her freedom to “create” is severely restricted by male values, which her fact of being married cements. Michelle Elleray writes “the significance of marriage lies in its gate-keeping role between acceptable and unacceptable sexual behaviour for women, and thus its function in shoring up the incarceration of women in traditional gender roles” (33). In accepting the normative structures of the Gilfillan household, Brenda is condemning herself to subordination.

This recalls Mary Wollstonecraft’s statement that women, “when they marry, they act as...children may be expected to act: they dress, they paint, and nickname God’s creatures...” (10). Pierre

Bourdieu further explains: “being condemned to circulate as tokens and thus to institute relations between men, they are reduced to the status of instruments of production or reproduction of symbolic and social capital” (43). Wednesday’s lifestyle is incongruous with this construction; it is described by her brother-in-law Crispin as involving “degraded practices” (Hyde, WC 35) and

“indecency” (36), and results in her self-imposed exile from her family and their definition of propriety.

As well as this universal marginalisation of women, the individual communities of settlers that are marginalised in the works of Nicholas and Wakefield are invoked by Hyde as ancestors in a lineage of organic settlement that runs counter to the oppression of official, organised and

“respectable” settlement. Wednesday is depicted as being part of this lineage of settlers that reject the traditional values of official settlement. We learn that before she lived on the island, Wednesday was “living where [she] wasn’t wanted” (273); Great Uncle Elihu, another member of the Gilfillan family, and Wednesday’s ideological predecessor, is similarly excluded. He lives, 94

upstairs, mostly in the attics. With his own manservant. The place hasn’t been properly

cleaned for twenty years. None of the maids dares go near it. It’s a sort of bluebeard’s

chamber, with Rip Van Winkle instead of Bluebeard inside. The old man... Elihu

Corson...practically is early Auckland. He’s ninety, he can’t move without a wheel-chair,

and he’s forgotten nothing. That’s the trouble. (39-40)

Elihu is banished to the attic, because he remembers the settlement of Auckland before it was altered by colonial nationalism. Michelle Elleray writes that “Wednesday’s Children repeatedly suggests a former authenticity to the Pākehā presence in New Zealand which has been lost with the advent of bourgeois values – in other words, through respectability’s alignment with anglophilia”

(34). I would suggest that rather than intimating authenticity, the figure of Uncle Elihu serves as a figure of interruption, able to look at nationalism and point out its hypocrisies, and repression of heterogeneity. He looks at subsequent generations of New Zealanders and sees “a sameness about them” (Hyde, WC 43), and does not “give a tin whistle for people who were recognised in society, or trying to be recognised in society” (92). He represents a subversive element that reminds the

Gilfillans of the inauthenticity of their own version of settlement and values, but does not need to represent authenticity himself. Elihu is a thorn in the side of respectability, taking pleasure in unorthodox behaviour:

The only one whose death afforded him pleasure was old Slessinger, who was

discovered in his granddaughter’s boudoir, bolt upright in a sitz bath, naked except for a

scarlet velvet smoking-cap. ‘That’, Uncle Elihu had said at the time, ‘is the stuff to give

’em.’ (Hyde, WC 43) 95

His celebration of unorthodoxy and perhaps immorality is the reason for his exile within the family.

As in the texts of my first chapter, where non-British, non-establishment settlers are continually pushed to the margins to make way for rigid middle class utopianism, so too do the Gilfillans attempt to paper over aspects of their own history in an attempt to maintain their status quo, and to them “Great-Uncle Elihu was the devil” (42).

The lineage that Wednesday inherits from Elihu is still associated with settlement however, and in this sense, it is English and British settlement that is still at the heart of Wednesday’s

Children. This is despite the presence of many other immigrant groups featured in the novel. The text places a large emphasis on non-British immigrants living in New Zealand, such as Dalmatians,

Chinese, Italians, Greeks, Irish and others. These groups are all witnessed in Wednesday’s walk around the working class neighbourhood where her fortune telling business is based. She sees

“shady little cafés with Dalmatian names” (WC 105) and at “the Chinese laundry... the yellow gnome, Mr. Ah Low” (106). Foreignness is always signposted by Hyde, suggesting an “otherness,” despite her purposeful intention to include these groups. By contrast, there are those people who

Hyde does not attach a demonym to, those who are then designated by default as being “New

Zealanders”. It is a paradox of Hyde’s attempt to foreground the marginalisation of non-British settlers in New Zealand that she still has to designate them as external to both versions of settler nationalism that she identifies.

Both Mulgan and Hyde attempt to redirect the utopian project to fit their personal definition of New Zealand nationalism. Like the writers before them, the settlement project is redesigned around the needs of those that they see as central to New Zealand nationalism. Because of the narrowly focussed masculine and anti-capitalist narrative of Man Alone, Mulgan’s utopia consists of nationalism based on Marxist unity and ascetic living for male figures, combined with a masculinist ordering of the natural world. Stead claims that Man Alone is two fictions, one an economic history 96 and the other “much more universal” (176), where Johnson contends with the bush. The utopian direction of the novel can be categorised in the same way. A settler utopia can only be realised when both of the problems that Mulgan posits as being critical to settlement can be overcome. Thus the novel funnels Marxism and neo-naturalism together for a glimpse of utopia to be witnessed.

The process of Marxist uniting begins with an increased awareness of political oppression for Johnson. This politicizing serves as a counter to Johnson’s previous political apathy, proving that conditions are such that Johnson has no option but to force changes. It is in the scenes preceding the riots where political action is the only possible outcome of the material situation.

Previously Johnson is reluctant to join any union in the labour camp and is motivated by individualism rather than collective action. When striking workers begin to violently riot in

Auckland, and Johnson is involved, marching with the men from his work camp, he begins to glimpse a possible solution to the social oppression of New Zealand working men. The riot has

“some meaning, at least in the numbers of people that it had drawn together” (Mulgan, MA 53).

When the demonstrators begin to morph into rioters, Johnson notes that for them “it was the releasing of accumulated desire, a payment for the long weeks and months of monotony and poverty and anxiety” (56). A climax is reached when the men from the camps decide to march on the town hall to demand better conditions. When Johnson is confronted with this mass movement he is forced to take a side; he joins the demonstrators. The situation is no longer something he can ignore, and so he becomes active. When joining other men on the march he finds that “a new spirit”

(53) comes over the men when they march together, and that

He lost the sense of waste and frustration that had been with him. Instead he

felt that he had a part in something. What it was he could not have said, but

only that he was with men who shared his lack of fortune, who were the same

as he was and had the same purpose; that they were going forward together, 97

where he could not say, but only that they were going somewhere and would

be together. (54-55)

This passage is where Marxist possibility is truly glimpsed by Johnson. Mulgan is reluctant to attempt to envisage what the future outcome is, but the idea that the rioters are “going forward” implies improvement in the social structure. Utopia is not witnessed, but there is a sense that old structures are being lifted, and a new meaning to Johnson’s existence may become evident. This paragraph paraphrases the Manifesto of the Communist Party, in which Marx and Engels, in summation of their aims, call for “working men of all countries [to] unite!” (71; par. 203). Terry

Eagleton writes, “Marxism as a discourse emerges when it is both possible and necessary for it to do so, as the ‘immanent critique’ of capitalism, and so as a product of the very epoch it desires to move beyond” (Marx Ch. 1). This kind of immanence, and imminence was stressed in the journalistic pieces that Mulgan and Geoffrey Cox wrote while in Oxford called “Behind the Cables” about the volatile situation in pre-Second World War Europe, but directed at a New Zealand readership. Stuart Murray notes the changing tone in these pieces from 1936 onwards, where second person perspective articles would attempt to force the readers into confronting Europe’s crises. The articles reflect an “obvious personal desire to inform the New Zealand audience of the severity of the European crisis, and at times there seems no disguising the anger that both Mulgan and Cox feel at international apathy over the continuing crisis” (Murray 208-209).

The unity of men in Man Alone helps to affirm non-alienated labour, and greater connection to the means of production, resulting in a re-imagining of New Zealand’s industry. The opposite of the meaningless work caused by the depression is Johnson’s labour on Stenning’s farm. Johnson

“could not like Stenning… but he liked working with him… He was good towards Johnson and treated him equally and fairly” (88-89). It may even be considered “the best life in the world” (89).

Stenning is the owner of the farm, but he is willing to split the ownership with Johnson, creating the 98 conditions for his productive agency. The Depression is not forgotten, but to Johnson and Stenning it became not “at all real. What was real was the battle they were both fighting with the land they worked. So long as they could live there and were left alone, it was a battle that they could carry on, even while the world sank around them” (100). Here, the reach of global capitalism is real, but asceticism and non-alienated labour offers, if not redemption then at least a means of glimpsing a better way of life. As long as Johnson is engaged in work which he feels attached to, then he is subverting the capitalist world system and beginning to work outside of it. The ascetic aspect of this exclusion of the outside world and commitment to labour is reminiscent of More’s original Utopia, where the monastic communal structure serves as a response to the early capitalist practice of enclosure in England and show Mulgan’s utopian aims are a response to the continuing influence of capitalistic modernity on New Zealand. However, the dangerous interruption of Rua to this masculine unity undermines the reactive developments of these chapters of the book.

The masculine unity present in both the riot and the Stenning’s farm chapters precede the solution to the naturalist dimension to the novel, and only after this is resolved can a better form of settlement be witnessed. The solution to man’s separation from nature is posited during Johnson’s period as a fugitive on Mt Ruapehu, where he becomes emblematic of mankind and thus Mulgan’s nation, overcoming the indifferent danger of the natural world. C.K. Stead argues that Mulgan is attempting to understand the identity of New Zealand in this passage, “mythically, existentially, even metaphysically” (176). I would argue that the naturalist aspect of the novel supports this view, in that in these scenes, Johnson attempts to understand the New Zealand environment in order to overcome it. The wilderness he encounters first leaves him “baffled and angry,” gales blow that

“wrap[ped] round him and blind[ed[ him,” and the areas he encounters are “strange and desolate,”

“lifeless” and "mournful and more frightening than anything human that he had known" (Mulgan, 99

MA 135-136). Alex Calder, when comparing Man Alone to a western film, writes of how this kind of danger leads to heightened consciousness:

When the hero is given over to the present moment, he risks losing himself in another

sense too. His unselfconsciousness, a form of heightened awareness, ought to be sharply

distinct from loss of consciousness, yet in the Western, these two states move close to

each other, as if they were two sides of the one ideal. (Calder 227)

Johnson retreats into a state of half-starved meditation that embodies the situation Calder describes:

Arguing with himself, he guessed it was partly fear of the world outside and the troubles that

he had to face, and partly the tiredness of semi-starvation that had weakened him. Whatever

it was, he found himself now accepting the discomforts that had at first disturbed him and in

a way interested him, so that he would sit for hours by the smoking fire outside his cave in

dreams that were half sleep, and then even to go and hunt birds was an effort to him. He

fought this weakness until he knew that he could only fight it by going on, and, if he could

come through, emerging into the world again. (MA 142)

Here we see both the debilitating and malignant aspect of nature’s effect on Johnson. His commitment to overcome it though is the key aspect of his triumph, and shows the masculine adaptation required for utopian belonging in New Zealand. Stead describes Johnson in these scenes as existential man, trying to decide whether to be alone or in society, and evidently Johnson decides he cannot remain isolated. Mulgan presents this as being somehow a ’pure’ thought, that only near death does Johnson come to the truth of needing to be a part of society, almost certainly a masculine one. This echoes Civello’s assertion that Hemingway’s writing demonstrates a “modernist belief in 100 consciousness as an ordering principle” (3). Calder explains this consciousness as being driven by

“male romanticism” (228), again reaffirming Mulgan’s version of masculine nationalism.

The end point of this symbolic journey beyond the reach of capitalism and above the threat of the natural world is found in the hut of Bill Crawley, Johnson’s first human company after his ordeal. What the hut represents is the site of new settlement, a space of potential once again. Its utopian characteristics have already been glimpsed by Johnson earlier in the text, in the masculine work shared with Stenning and the togetherness and action of the riot sequence, but it is only once

Johnson has undertaken the symbolic journey and overcome the twin crises of the novel that it is able to be presented in a more crystallised form. As a utopian destination, the hut is the beachhead of Mulgan’s new nationalism, of Johnson’s resettling of New Zealand in a more authentic way, where both the problems of naturalism and capitalism that I have already identified become obsolete.

The domestic situation of the hut represents the selfless masculine camaraderie missing in

Mulgan’s vision of capitalist New Zealand. When Johnson barges into the hut, Bill welcomes him with “Howdy mate” (150), not questioning who he is or where he has come from, then after

Johnson collapses from exhaustion, Bill “picked him up without a word” (150) and puts him in a bunk to sleep. We learn that Bill is asleep on the floor, leaving Johnson the only bunk, even though he declares later that he is “too old to sleep on the floor” (158). The division of man by the mode of capitalist production is being undone by the selflessness of Bill with his property and labour. This is in obvious contrast to the “uneasiness” that depression brought about on New Zealand’s subjects.

An ascetic, monastic mode is also present in the hut, where Johnson and Bill work sometimes together, sometimes apart, with no conception of the events of the outside world. “The old man kept no calendar” (155) and so the hut exists in an isolated time, safely distanced from the events of the non-utopian society. Bill warns Johnson off “want[ing] to go drinking around towns 101 with women and all” (157), an indication of an ascetic avoidance of vice and pleasures, replaced with simplicity and separation, especially from women. Any labour undertaken by Johnson and Bill is direct and functional, related to their immediate survival. Johnson “make himself useful, g[etting] water and wood” (154), while Bill hunts animals for them to eat. Of Bill’s purchased stores, he shares everything freely with Johnson. He tells Johnson “You’re eating me out of beans and flour”

(155) but that “It’s nothing, son, you’re welcome. You just made the spring trip come a little earlier, that’s all” (155).

The reader is witnessing a microcosm of a world of Marxist unity, where capitalism has been rejected in favour of egalitarianism, protected by an ascetic framework that rejects false ideals and fixes. The settler masculinity that Mulgan portrays as central to national identity is dominant over the indifferent environment, cementing this as the strongest version of nationalism according to the parameters that Mulgan has set. Thus, the two themes of suffering that Mulgan writes of are woven into one solution of utopian unity that protects and develops the nation.

Robin Hyde’s utopian vision also invokes the settlement trope, based around Wednesday’s island, she tries to develop an authentic approach to New Zealand nationalism that enacts the need to adapt to new space. The island serves as a metaphor for a recolonisation of New Zealand, where the island and the isolation it represents is the “locus of the utopian element of the novel”

(Casertano 50). Michelle Elleray, Stuart Murray and Susan Ash all make reference to Hyde’s A

Home in this World (1937) where Hyde writes of a desire to find a home from where she can

“stretch out giant shadowy hands” (10-11). These critics equate Wednesday’s island to this grounding space. From this place of national redirection, Wednesday’s island represents what authentic settlement would resemble if left to develop. Wednesday’s affinity with a tradition of

“authentic” or at least marginalised, settling of New Zealand, means that her island is a space belonging to this tradition. Her suggestions of autochthony are always complicated by the presence 102 of settlement motifs which exclude and include, and necessitate the projection of settler interests onto a new landscape. The description of Wednesday’s house demonstrates how this still remains integral:

The beautiful wood, kauri and mahoe, built deeply into its walls, still haunted the air

with fragrance. There was no drying the sappy optimism out of those woods. Whitewash

domesticated the big cavern, which was the family’s favourite room. But the fire was an

immense open one, so every time the northerly blew, smoke huffed and puffed like a

djinn from the chimney, and the sooty flames twinkled and shook their hips... and the

whitewash became another shade off-white. It was coated with the warmth of their

living together. Wednesday wouldn’t have it re-washed for anything... the centre of the

kitchen was a long table of white pine... Seating herself, in imagination, at the head of

her table, Wednesday looked down at the row of flushed faces, and felt her heart could

almost break for pleasure in them. (20)

This description places emphasis on local materials, such as native woods and white pine, to suggest a more authentic, indigenous form of settlement rather than the imported old structures.

Nicholas Thomas points out however that this was a common trope of European settlers, where “the incorporation of forms, styles and motifs abstracted from... indigenous cultures might well proceed in the service of a... national identity” (Possessions 13). Once again colonialism makes its presence felt, and still informs aspects of Hyde’s national identity. Rather than the Anglocentric settlement represented by the Gilfillans, Wednesday’s house gestures towards settlement that is adapted to its environment, developing a unique nationalism out of its new location.

103

The island is a site of resettlement and recolonialism, this time with Hyde’s rejection of imported structures and instead a celebration of alterity and difference. So in keeping with the style of Wednesday’s Children, the island is an important space for imagining possibilities outside of societal norms. As it is revealed at the end of the book that most of what takes place on the island has been imagined rather than real, the island becomes even more important as a site of possibility rather than reality. It forms a critical utopia that reifies the liminal space, a site of reversed or obliterated social and national boundaries, of anarchic possibility in comparison to the failings of the utopian ideals of the previous generation. Tom Moylan writes, “a central concern in critical utopia is the awareness of the limitations of the utopian tradition, so that these texts reject utopia as a blueprint while preserving it as a dream” (10). Hence, Hyde’s vision does not attempt to place boundaries on what constitutes utopia. In fact, everything that occurs on the island and that the island represents is the reversal of its mainland counterpart, which leads Renata Casertano to assess the island as a celebration of the liminal, “a living theatre characterised by freedom, wit and transgression and steeped in a carnival atmosphere where everything is allowed and everything can happen” (41).

The anarchistic lifestyle on the island is evidence of this wariness of programmatical utopian and nationalist visions. Instead, the figures of the island are able to celebrate the liminal and find refuge from marginalisation. Most prominent is the way that Wednesday lives outside of the conventions of femininity that mainland society dictates. If Brenda Gilfillan’s domestic world represents the limit of female power in Anglocentric society, then Wednesday’s represents the possibility of liberation. As Susan Ash writes, “Wednesday refuses to assent to her own subordination and confinement in a society which would reduce her to a passive, acquiescent recipient of male will” (290). The equating of Wednesday to things outside of traditional femininity such as a vole (WC 16), and a brown pot (113) is an example of the way that Hyde resists allowing

Wednesday to be a construct of “woman” dictated by the patriarchal system. Judith Butler writes of 104 the way that the female subject is potentially a creation of the exclusionary politics of male domination: “The identity of the feminist subject ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics, if the formation of the subject takes place within a field of power regularly buried through the assertion of that foundation” (148). In other words, To assert the rights of “women” as a category allows the patriarchal system to dictate what is “other” and label it as one group, one kind of subject, thereby denying agency outside of its dictated boundaries. Thus Wednesday becomes a powerful figure in her own world, but her power is not bound by traditional ideas of femininity.

Instead, she is another figure who revels in the lack of oppressive power structures on this utopia.

She welcomes men onto the island, but they hold no power over her. These men find that

Wednesday offers them temporary refuge from their own societal rejection. They are from Greece,

Italy, Ireland and England and are all in some way not suited to life in the outside world. Witness

Beppo, the Italian father, who returns to the island having fled from military service in Abyssinia, or

Greek Constantine who has fled from his physically aggressive wife in Australia. These men would be marginalised by the outside world, and the island represents a space for their recuperation. As

Hyde writes, “if there hadn’t been the island for them to fly to – one could easily imagine the thud that so small a migrant as Beppo would have made, breaking against the great blind eye of reality”

(140).

This mix of nationalities on the island is an attempt to build a union that crosses national borders, and creates a utopia for the socially incarcerated or rejected regardless of nationality. In this sense the island could be read as anti-nationalist, and rather than asserting the nation as central to identity, it subverts the boundaries that nationalism relies on. The mix of people on the island is evidence of the (admittedly Eurocentric) multi-nationalist aspect of Hyde’s utopianism, where the boundaries of nationalism are only seen as tools of exclusion.

Likewise the primary Māori character in the novel, Wednesday’s housekeeper Maritana, serves not as an authentic figuring of Māori so much as another disruptive presence to hegemonic 105

European nationalism. The continuing presence of Māori was a threat to Anglo-centric settlement plans that expected a quick absorption of Māori into “civilised” society, as demonstrated in the texts of the previous two chapters. Though Hyde’s description of Maritana tends towards racist stereotyping, her intention seems to be to set up Maritana as a failed ’civilising’ project. Maritana expresses desire to dress “allasame like Pākehā queen” (WC 124) indicating an attempt to assimilate, but then Hyde describes how “Māoridom still expected the white man’s world to work along the same [Māori] lines, and was astounded when it got stung” (126). Hyde is expressing an incompatibility between Māori and Pākehā worlds that Maritana embodies, creating a visible signpost of indigenous difference and alterity. This poses a problem of interpretation, because Hyde is attempting the inclusion of indigenous voices in her new nationalism, but is unable or unwilling to portray her Māori character as having the same identity and function as her Pākehā settlers. In this regard, Hyde is still marginalising indigenous presence.

Wednesday’s children are her ultimate creations however, and their European heritage indicates Hyde’s favouring of settler nationalism as a dominant mode. The children are a manifestation of rebellion though, in that they are illegitimate and thus symbolic of Wednesday’s rejection of marriage. They are also born to different fathers of different nationalities which subverts imported British nationalism. As Wednesday’s creations, they serve as a “straight draught of prussic acid” (24) for the Gilfillan family, shamed by its association.

The children also represent the re-enactment of settlement, acting as tools for exploration and creation. Susan Ash calls them “extension(s) of Wednesday’s heroic self” (290) in the context of feminist power. This concept of the children being extensions of Wednesday also functions though, and perhaps more prominently through their role as metaphorical settlers. The older children, Attica, Naples and Dorset each are shown to have a particular hobby or interest which defines their role in national imagining. Dorset is an explorer, who accompanies an asylum patient on a mission for the Holy Land. His journey is ultimately futile, but it indicates his inheritance of 106 the desire to search for utopia. Attica is a sculptor whose hobby alludes to the creation of new identity and reality. She longs to “point to the hidden agony inside... and find the words to say [this] desire” (Hyde, WC 80), but reveals this desire to be one of shaping the real world, not the sculptures with “dead eyes” (79) in the museum. Naples is the science wing of this imagining, interested in animals and the role of humans in the natural world. His episode with a lion demonstrates an affinity with animals not recognised by other people. While he is comfortable with the lion, the trainer shows a “lack of faith in both human and leonine nature” (154), suggesting a separation from the natural world, which mirrors Mulgan’s naturalism.

The contrast between these two utopian visions suggests a unified nationalism or utopianism is not present at this stage of New Zealand literature. Instead, the dialectic continues with subjective texts arguing for their own prominence against each other and the utopias of the past. We can infer that a new form of nation may be beginning to develop in Hyde’s text that is based on the inclusion of all people whose vision was marginalised by mainstream nationalism. No single character has control over the island, even Wednesday, and thus it is a site for multiple projections and multiple possibilities. This is in contrast to Mulgan’s utopian redirection which firmly identifies male nationalism as central to settlement and enacts a process which allows for masculine domination of the land, and structured Marxism to be suggested as a potential utopian social system. Both authors react to the tradition of utopian settlement, but their differing ideas of national identity lead to radically different utopian projections. Despite their differences, both Mulgan and Hyde write from a position of settlement and national direction. They both identify New Zealand as a place with which to envisage utopian possibility, and both redesign their definition of nationalism to suit this idea. 107

Chapter Four: Post-War Anxiety and the Challenge to Pākehā Utopianism.

In this final chapter I will be comparing two texts which in responding to the New Zealand utopian dialectic, reject not only previous utopian visions but the very processes which constitute the tradition. As I will argue both texts signal the end the modes of writing I have been examining, resulting in the opening up of post-colonial possibilities. Smith’s Dream by C.K. Stead (1971 rev.

1973) and Intensive Care by Janet Frame (1970) represent a convergence of the utopian dialectic into an examination of the potentially destructive processes of nationalism and utopianism, indicating a loss of confidence in the colonial writing tradition. Smith’s Dream follows the titular character as he is confronted with several utopian visions which all prove to be flawed. Attempting his own romantic isolation, Smith is interrupted by capitalist totalitarianism, neo-imperial invasion, and reactionary socialism, which are all depicted by Stead as being too static and exclusive.

Frame’s novel also dismisses utopian processes which marginalise and amputate aspects of society that are not desirable. Set over three periods during the twentieth century, Intensive Care examines patterns of utopianism leading to marginalisation culminating in a dystopian future where

New Zealand is the site of an attempt to remove unwanted humans from the community and sell them as meat. As with Smith’s Dream, the overall effect of the novel suggests limitations to utopian thinking especially when combined with exclusive nationalism. In both texts, it is colonial settlers who become the “other” of these nationalist ideals, and thus the process of settlement and displacement is reversed and interrogated.

The historic context that Frame and Stead were writing in explains something about their texts. The United Kingdom was moving towards closer ties with Europe and loosening its relationship with New Zealand. Patrick Evans writes that “suddenly the country was being 108 defrosted, its citizens socially, psychologically and economically exposed to the air, abandoned by the mother country to an indifferent and newly challenging world in which its competitors were unfamiliar nations from outside the old colonial matrix” (Forgetting 16). A capitalist invasion led by Americans occurs in both texts, and it is they who are the agents of utopian projection onto New

Zealand, rather than the settler imaginary of the previous chapters. Both texts look at how nationalism and ideology can exclude and displace, by examining how American capitalist ideology can threaten Pākehā nationalism and harmony. These texts make the claim that global capitalist dominance undermines the agency of settler utopianism, which necessitates either the end of this mode, or a redirection that constructs a new paradigm within which to work.

Frame and Stead both attempt to point towards a version of human fulfilment not achievable through nationalism or programmatical utopianism. Frame was “a member of a particular generation, one that was brought up to think of art in general and literature in particular as having authority and power, and came to live in a world where this was less and less the case” (Evans, UW

69). Evans sees “the suspicion of the modern world... throughout Frame’s fiction...as a survivor of its more dystopian activities, about the workings of Western modernity (65). This suspicion of modernity leads to an attempt to uncover authentic truth in Intensive Care beyond the realms of modern assumptions and knowledge. Stead likewise attempts to bridge the gap between utopian visions and reality by suggesting a constant historical process and flux as the only way to glimpse a fleeting sense of utopia, indicating neither has fully abandoned the utopian project to fatalism and deconstruction.

Smith’s Dream portrays New Zealand as being at the centre of the Cold War, the result of the greatest challenge to capitalistic modernity yet witnessed. The Vietnam War, a proxy of the larger conflict was being fought at the time of Smith’s Dream’s writing. Stead presents the reader with the 109 threat of conflict spilling into New Zealand and a choice having to be made. The novel warns of a fin-de-siécle crisis in which New Zealand has no choice but to confront the opposing ideologies of the world.

Both the communist East and the capitalist West cultivated their interpretations of the

world, including the promise of a definitive break with the human tragedies of the past

and exclusive access to universal happiness, social harmony, equality and freedom in the

future. (Scott-Smith & Segal 1)

The Cold War can be characterised as a global struggle between two competing claims to utopian fulfilment, between the capitalist West led by the United States of America and the Communist East led by the Soviet Union. Twentieth century utopianism was partially defined by this conflict, which began with the Russian revolution in 1917, and maintained relevance during the hyper-capitalist post-war era in the West, and the strengthening of the Soviet Union until its eventual collapse in the early 1990s; Susan Buck-Morss writes, “The construction of mass utopia was the dream of the twentieth century. It was the driving ideological force of industrial modernization in both its capitalist and socialist forms” (ix). The idea that two dreams of utopia were the defining aspects of the century meant that the proxy wars fought between these two powers were the actual meeting points between two utopian projects, the neutral frontiers of utopia.

The proximity of the Vietnam War to New Zealand, and the southward spread of communism lead Stead to imagine the North Island as a possible meeting point for another proxy war between the two superpowers. This meeting of ideologies would force people to make a choice between capitalism and communism and align themselves accordingly. The idea of political neutrality for New Zealand is completely rejected in Smith’s Dream and settler agency to imagine utopia is replaced by the urgency of global conflict and pan-national ideologies. 110

Stead approaches this as both a chance to reject previous notions of New Zealand’s utopian isolation, and as a chance to examine the evocation of a status quo utopian image for non-utopian programmatical purposes. Smith’s island serves as a metaphor for earlier settler ideas of utopianism, as well as for a model of utopianism throughout history. Reminiscent of such utopian islands as

More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis as well those closer to home such as that of

Wednesday’s Children, Smith’s island represents the totalised space of utopian isolation, an attempt to exist externally from the outside non-utopian world. The dream of the title is Smith’s attempt to live an almost subsistence lifestyle on an island in the Coromandel, an island that Smith arrives at and mutters “My God... I’m free” (9). His settlement on Gut Island is portrayed as an idealised analogue of European settlement in New Zealand, where Smith makes an “informal agreement”

(10) with a Māori elder in order to live on the island. The agrarian Cockaigne that Smith inhabits

(plentiful fish, vegetable and game) is described as the “dream that lived in the heart of every Kiwi”

(11). Stead refers to previous visions of abundance and isolation but presents them as a false utopia, with a romantic idea of abundance that is ultimately false and unsustainable.

Stead indicates too that isolation is not a path to fulfilment. Smith begins to feel as if he is

“in an alien role” (12), being outside “the conventions of his society, outside those norms of his behaviour which, he began to suspect, had held him together, giving him whatever solidity and confidence he possessed” (13). Reading Montaigne’s Essays on his island, he surmises that the role of man, the role of the individual in the world is determined by his relation to other humans and self-imposed exile is therefore of no benefit to him. As Montaigne wrote in “On Solitude”

Now the end I think is always the same: how to live in leisure at our ease. But people do

not always seek the way properly. Often they think they have left their occupations

behind when they have merely changed them... by ridding ourselves of Court and 111

market-place we do not rid ourselves of the principal torments of our life...We take our

fetters with us; the freedom is not total: we still turn our gaze towards the things we have

left behind; our imagination is full of them. (3-5)

Smith, like the utopians of the past comes up against the unrealisability of utopia, the “no-place” aspect of the utopian dream that keeps it just out of reach. His attempt to isolate himself from his problems fails because he cannot leave them behind. The reference to Montaigne acts as a signpost to show Stead’s awareness of the relationship between Montaigne’s early secular humanism and utopianism, as well as to show the benefits of experiential analysis over utopian projection. Smith’s dream is not Smith’s reality on the island, and thus his experience outweighs his imagination, and even though Montaigne pondered the idea that “a powerful imagination produces the event” (42), he also asked if the imagination “always wish[ed] what we want it to?” (42) suggesting perhaps that

Smith’s utopia is cut short by his own uncontrollable wish for something he left behind. Isolation induces guilt about the outside world, and Smith is ultimately forced to concede that his lifestyle is not the dream he envisaged. The analogy of Smith’s island to New Zealand as a whole serves to illustrate Stead’s views on New Zealand settlement. Ultimately, like Smith, the “Kiwi dream” is just that, a dream and cannot be realised by ignoring history, international relations, and global politics.

The quest for New Zealand as a whole to find a purpose and meaning sits alongside Smith’s quest, and thus faces the same problems.

However, it is the interruption of outside forces that cut short Smith’s dream, validating

Smith’s own realisations. This interruption comes in the form of nationalist dictator Volkner, who has slowly transformed New Zealand into a totalitarian state while Smith has been in exile.

Volkner’s rise to power comes by appealing to material interests and utilising nationalism to justify his power. His name and rhetoric obviously evoke Hitler, and the history of Germany gives us clues as to how Stead wants us to view Volkner. Post-first world war Germany, burdened by its defeat to 112 the allied powers was in the midst of a total economic collapse. It was this collapse that allowed

Hitler to gain control of the country and people, installing a Fascist dictatorship in place of the

Weimar Republic. Stead presents New Zealand’s situation in 1970 as being similar. Failed capitalism, and the threat of Britain joining the EEC has meant New Zealand faces another depression, with New Zealand’s “markets... disappearing one by one” (Stead, SD 7).

In order to preserve “our old standards (and especially our standard of living)” (8), the rise of Volkner is welcomed. Volkner equates this bourgeois individualism to a national idealism worth fighting for by New Zealanders. The breakdown of economic prosperity invokes nationalist sentiments, Volkner’s suggestion that without action, “New Zealand was finished” (7) is a strong appeal to the preservation of nationalism. Volkner explains to Smith that he “invoked the spirit of

New Zealand and the wine of life. A New Zealand life for New Zealanders” (38).

Volkner’s appeal to a unique nationalism is bolstered by his fear-mongering about the threat of a communist “other”. His calls for “national unity, which succeeded... in arousing fear in everyone” (7) are to prevent foreign invasion: “steadily, relentlessly, communism was advancing, its slant eyes fixed on fertile acres we no longer knew what to do with or how to defend” (7-8).

Volkner tries to appeal to Smith by describing New Zealanders as “truly British” (42), in an attempt to signal communist “otherness” and appeal to Smith.

Volkner’s New Zealand however, is revealed to be a dystopia of severely restricted freedoms. This includes restrictions on movement, the physical manifestation of which are the road blocks that threaten Smith’s escape to the countryside after arrest. The risk of being branded an

“extremist” (50) is high, as the extremists risk being dragged away “into detention for their own good and ours” (50). There are obvious precedents for this kind of situation in both American

McCarthyism and Soviet internal trials. Speech is restricted by the “Special X” police, Smith being warned to be “Careful!” (17) when asking about Volkner before his arrest. The greatest loss of freedom however is Volkner’s ceasing of democratic elections, meaning New Zealanders have no 113 choice but to accept his rule. This creates a static state, where the potential for growth into something beyond is rendered impossible by the totalitarian state.

Stead is here raising the issue of programmatical and institutional nationalism as a potentially dangerous and destructive force, designed in this case to pull people together in the name of preserving capitalism against foreign bogeymen. This nationalism culminates with “rule of a man who increasingly revealed himself to be insane” (49). Stead shows the possibility of this occurring in New Zealand in the name of the national ideology, a clear message to not be complacent towards subjective programs. Volkner’s appeal to a specific nationalist identity is important, but equally important is the populist and conformist streak of nationalism that encourages people to follow public opinion and not question normative values. What Stead does is bring this situation into a New Zealand context, attempting to debunk the idea that New Zealand is isolated from this form of politics, while also highlighting the fact that conformist societies such as post-war New Zealand were prone to potential institutional oppression in the name of nationalism.

Janet Frame also suggests New Zealand will not be able to isolate itself from global events, and that existing ideas of utopia may be fuelling these international threats to New Zealand. Marc

Delrez notes that “the structure of the novel emphasises the notion of historical continuity” (191), where “history perpetuates within a shallow sequence of time” (195). The text is divided into three sections which reflect the episodic global destruction of the first two world wars and what is presented as an inevitable progression into a third. The third act is the most dystopian, imagining a post-nuclear world where the same problems that beset the first two acts are once again enacted, presenting utopianism as a potentially destructive force in itself. We learn in the final section of “the recent war...the devastation of the North Island” (Frame 171) and of the “devastated cities and countrysides” (175) of the Northern Hemisphere, meaning New Zealand is not immune and isolated 114 from suffering. However, this destruction is not merely the work of outside forces to the nation, but universal forces which also create nationalism and utopianism.

The first two acts of Intensive Care establish the patterns which explain the third. Frame presents her characters as having a disdain for the mundane, a compulsive urge for newer and better situations, places, and companions in a constant attempt to acquire something that is out of reach.

This compulsion is presented as universal and eternal, becoming an explanation and a criticism of the repeating utopian redirection of the texts in my previous chapters. For example, the description of historical “idle aristocrats [that] set out each day to to hunt and kill their golden fox” (12) that we see at the very start of the text is repeated throughout by a desire for other “golden foxes”. Tom, in the first act, dreams of “gold fields and gold mines [where he is] head of a happy family in a world made forever safe for – happy families” (44). This is in contrast to feelings about his wife Eleanor, who “cling[s] to him, abasing herself in a way that made him despise her...” (39). The familiarity of his wife spurs Tom to dream of something exotic. His brother Leonard likewise dreams of living in the Mediterranean where for him “and his wife it was like paradise” (57). Within Leonard’s dream in particular the specificity of what drives the longing is apparent. Leonard longs for a life where he is not disfigured by the motorcycle accident he had after the war, and upon waking he remembers his ’real’ life “beyond the family orbit in an outer darkness of drunkenness and disgrace” (59). This theme of situational dissatisfaction is prevalent. In act two, Colin’s feelings of Wellington as

“familiar” and “drab” (144) and of Christchurch where “the flatness of the city depressed” (151) him, fuel his dreams and desires: “His heart, set to be pulled anywhere, it was so much a spring of longing, and desire...” (144). This constant longing and despising of the the familiar means that the novel’s events are always being pushed further into increased longing and greater disdain for that which does not satisfy. When we relate this back to the utopian tradition in New Zealand, it seems as if Frame is suggesting that the desire for utopia is driven by a disdain for familiarity, and that utopia may never be realised in our national imagining. 115

Instead, the rejection of that which does not fit utopian imagining precedes its destruction, both symbolically and literally. We can see this pattern occurring in Intensive Care as dreamworlds are imagined by characters who are unable to realise them, compelling them to remove the obstacles that block this construction. This pattern occurs in multiple synchronous instances, punctuated by war as the largest effect of dreamworld dissatisfaction. The first section describes the aftermath of the First World War, and the attempt by some to build a better world out of its chaos. The action focuses on Tom Livingstone and his attempts to realise a dream that forms during the war and an obsession with his wartime nurse Ciss Everest. He spends “forty-five years... directly in her shadow” (31), and the dreamworld he lives in is so intense that upon finding Ciss again as an aged and dying woman in an English hospital, who does not recognise him, he is “seized with absurd fierce anger. She had failed him... his whole life had been built on the memory of her” (30). He then kills her, because the “privacy of his nightmare [has been] ripped open” (26). Likewise Colin

Torrance, Tom’s grandson enacts a similar episode in section two of Intensive Care. Colin falls in love with his colleague Lorna Kimberley, whose blonde hair and violet eyes follow the pattern set in Ciss’ description. When Lorna leaves him, Colin’s dream is shattered and “there was nothing he could say to that, it was so removed from his own sense of actuality” (138). Colin’s response matches Tom’s, in that he kills Lorna and her parents, preventing them from further interrupting his dream. Their dreamworlds do not match reality, so both are compelled to preserve their dream by destroying what they can of intrusive reality, in both cases destroying the cause of their desire.

The destruction of that which does not fit into a dreamworld acts as a metaphor for utopian nationalism. Nationalism as a process involves the “othering” of that which does not fit the definition of the nation, and we have seen in the preceding chapters how this process works in settlement literature. Frame presents this process by suggesting that people and communities

“amputate” those things which do not fit dreamworlds. I have already shown how the first two acts establish the universality of this pattern, but it is in the third where we see it on a national scale and 116 realise Frame’s metaphor. After the inevitable nuclear war, New Zealand, fulfilling its nineteenth century role as the world’s social laboratory is to become the testing ground for the “Human

Delineation Act” which separates national subjects into “human” and “animal” categories. The act divides society and classifies people as human or animal. Those classified as animal become commodified into the primary economy: “...the Utopian vision of the effects, the blossoming of an economy based on primary products, where primary meant human animal” (172). This amputation and removal of human subjects that do not fit into a utopian definition of national belonging is a natural successor to the smaller-scale events of the first two acts, and also serves as an exaggerated response and warning to the patterns set in the texts of my earlier chapters.

Both Stead and Frame thus imagine scenarios where nationalist utopianism creates suffering for the marginalised subjects of the nation. Unlike Robin Hyde who suggests redirection of nationalism into a more inclusive mode, Frame and Stead present this as no longer possible, owing to the incursion of neo-imperialism in New Zealand. The idea of American armed forces controlling

New Zealand is featured in both Smith’s Dream and Intensive Care and begins to point towards a global world where national ideology becomes less important than the neo-imperial dreamworlds of capitalism and communism.

What resistance to Volkner in Smith’s Dream eventuates in is the invasion of a destructive and marginalising force. This comes in the form of the United States military, and instigates a form of reactionary nationalism that is presented as initially being more “authentic” than Volkner’s rhetoric. The American attempt to stem the spread of communism is portrayed in Smith’s Dream as a neo-imperialist destroyer of personal freedoms, as a physical manifestation of bourgeois violence against oppressed peoples. The Americans prop up Volkner’s dictatorship, supplying weapons and manpower to defeat enemies of the state. Their willingness to kill citizens and destroy property is a 117 suggestion by Stead that capitalist ideology holds more importance to Volkner than the defence of the nation. The destruction of the guerrilla-held township of Coromandel is evidence of this:

Hour after hour through the morning Smith sat, a desperate calm settling over him, as if

it were his own body, his own life down there that was being beaten out of existence.

The planes rose and fell, swooped and dived and climbed, the gunships hovered, rockets,

bombs and shells exploding under them, until there were only the scorched outlines of

the town, like a blurred map sketched out roughly in charcoal, of what had been there

before. Still the attack went on. It was ‘superior firepower’; it was ‘overkill’; it was the

Free World at its work on a fine morning in the name of all that was affluent. (124).

The preservation of New Zealand against communist invasion is completely undermined in this passage, as the total destruction wreaked upon Coromandel reveals the cost of being on the border between capitalism and communism.

Even more apposite is the fact that the battle itself the very act of destruction supports the capitalist system. We see the profiteers of conflict suggest that “if the guerillas were ever in danger of being completely flushed out of our hills the Government should conscript a force of eighteen-year-olds to supply them with new blood” (76), because the war “brought us tourists in uniform, young men with pockets full of dollars” (75). Amongst this chaos and loss of rights for most citizens, the capitalist elite of New Zealand and the global capitalist hegemony are profiting.

Utopia for one power is absolute dystopia for those who are necessarily oppressed to make the initial utopia possible.

As in Smith’s Dream the incursion of neo-imperialism into New Zealand in Intensive Care is a chance to show how settler utopianism has been displaced by a new utopian projection attempting 118 to displace New Zealanders. In Intensive Care, the American incursion is a slow and sinister takeover of the country, where it becomes apparent that the New Zealand state has no real control over its own utopian scheme, but that it is a project of a wider ideological system controlled by the

United States. We learn that “the preliminary work for the Human Delineation Act had been carried out by the Investigating Committee (whom we had never met; some said they had been flown from

America for the purpose)” (172), and eventually that New Zealand was “already zoned and protected by the new police who had begun to arrive in planeloads from the United States of

America” (174). The national borders become porous owing to the incursion of the capitalist dreamworld, where New Zealand becomes a capitalist utopia as in Smith’s Dream, where an elite few benefit from the suffering and death of New Zealanders.

This technique of distancing the invaders from New Zealand makes more clear Frame’s intentions, as the American’s foreignness presents them as a threat to a form of genuine or organic nationalism. They are clearly “other” to New Zealand, easily seen in the representation of their speech in the “Milly” sections of the final act. She describes meeting an officer where “it dawned on [her] that he spoke Ammerrykin” (211), and later when speaking to a New Zealander, she notices

“he was speaking Amerrykin, shaw thing baby. It is catching” (215). This incursion creates a boundary of national identity that is being obscured by the clear influence and power of the

Americans over New Zealand.

Capitalism is not the only force of modernity that has overtaken the control systems of the country in Intensive Care. As feared in Erewhon, a blind faith in technology has meant that humans are now beholden to machines in a certain capacity. This is best demonstrated by the central computer in Intensive Care which classifies humans into their categories. Described as “the aristocrat of the machines” (175), the central computer is responsible for all final classification. The machine, as a perfectly rational being has overtaken humanity as the most powerful creature. With the computer having the right to decide who lives or dies, humanity has lost control over its own 119 future. The goal of New Zealand utopianism, to preserve European humanism against the negative effects of modern change is thus made complicated by a reliance on technology.

Something which emerges from Stead and Frame’s narratives however is an attempt to portray settlers as an indigenous “other” to the invading forces. The suffering inflicted on New

Zealanders is based on a loss of agency and forced assimilation into hostile systems. This can be read as an appropriation of Māori displacement and suffering in an attempt to indigenise through a similar Pākehā experience. This is certainly possible, as both texts make little mention of Māori presence, aside from Stead’s romantic descriptions of Mr Taupiri, a Māori elder who trades land for seafood. While it could be argued that this displacement functions as an allegory which highlights

Māori marginalisation, it seems more likely that both authors are arguing against the processes of nationalist exclusion, not aimed particularly at settler dispossession. The warnings of the text are aimed at Pākehā audiences, and the fear caused by each text is derived from the possibility of

Pākehā displacement, rather than a realisation of past wrongs. There are opportunities for each author to make clearer connections which they do not do. For example, the final section of Intensive

Care suggests that after the effects of classification, there is now such deep “nostalgia for that called

– miscalled – animal, that the deformed, the insane, the defective, the outcasts, the unhappy have become the new elite” (266). The reference to animals here revives the imagery of early texts where

Māori are presented as being perhaps less than human, as “animal” and “deformed”. Rather than make this connection anywhere in the text however, Frame accepts Pākehā cultural dominance and warns Pākehā of the dangers of marginalising their own.

It would be wrong to suggest however that these texts are entirely negative in outlook, as each allude to an attempt to imagine the possibility of utopian transformation. Each author demonstrates a faith in some form of teleology, whereby historical time can bring about positive 120 rather than negative change, though each is unable or unwilling to try and fully explain the process required. Stead’s vision is of a world of flux, able to be understood by human consciousness, albeit only in moments before it disappears. Frame implies a world beyond our consciousness that can only be seen through naïve vision rather than a categorising language.

Smith of Smith’s Dream initially confronts Volkner’s dystopia by joining the communist-aligned, though nationalist guerrilla movement against the regime. The defence of existing nationalism is presented as an early goal. Smith’s father-in-law Arthur sees the “important question [as] not how had it happened, but how was the old order ever to be restored?” (Stead 54).

To this end, Smith’s work with the guerrillas seems to be motivated by this intention, fighting until

“Volkner’s regime was defeated and the country had returned to something like the normal order of things” (71). However, Smith is shown to have a number of epiphanies which confirm not so much a return to an old way, but belief in a teleology of essential existence to follow. Stead is pointing towards a natural impermanence, which comes to full clarity in another epiphany:

...Smith felt triumphant, light headed, as if this new day was not merely uncovering, but

was bringing into being, bringing to new and better life, all he could see down there –

land and water, farm and highway and town. For that moment Smith believed himself to

be a true revolutionary, believed that revolution was in the air and the soil and the plants,

that it was the state of becoming which was the state of nature, and that only man’s

desperate, doomed, egotistical hunger for unaltered being hindered and made brutal what

was in nature a pure and limpid flowing...Pride stands alone and is destroyed. Drown

your identity in the flux and you are the flux, living and dying and reborn with it. (121) 121

Here is Smith’s attempt to harness the meaning of existence, through a romantic rendering of the natural world. For revolution to be “in the air and the soil and the plants” indicates a purely romantic attempt to locate utopianism in nature, to show how mimicking the natural world is essential to living in it. It is the permanent flow of time that is the true state of being, and thus

Volkner’s attempt to cease progress in New Zealand is the antithesis of the natural order of existence. The communist guerrillas are representative of a human existence that matches this natural order of time and change. This does not indicate however a welcoming of a socialist regime into New Zealand, as the text presents the communist countries as static too: “They don’t concern me. They represent the past. I’m not interested in the institutions of communism. Maybe they become as corrupt as our own. It’s revolution that matters” (Stead 128). This speech by one of the guerrillas indicates in some sense the impossibility of realising permanent utopia, because the world is naturally dynamic. Here we see then that all of the reactionary nationalism of most of the text is in fact redundant compared to a conception of constant revolution. There is no constant national essence, just as the institutions of state become corrupt by their very coming into being. There is only constant revolution and change and in that flux is utopia, but it is not and cannot be permanent according to Stead. This is why Smith’s death at the end of the text is purposefully irrelevant to the novel’s themes, because the constant revolution enforces change. Smith’s death does not change the impermanence of nature, so much as continue it. This is a clear rejection of the previous models of nationalism and utopianism, significant because it does not attempt to supersede the previous utopias with a new one, so much as reject the paradigms which give rise to them.

Frame’s conception of utopia similarly rejects the settler model, instead suggesting that it is unable to be imagined with our current ideas. Alex Calder writes of Frame’s “mirror” cities that represent other worlds as ungraspable realities on a higher plane (259), and these are represented obliquely in Intensive Care. Jan Cronin proposes that a Platonic scheme governs Intensive Care, 122 suggesting that Frame is alluding to “Plato’s Cave” throughout. She cites the dream sequence of

May, a character who exists in Tom’s dream as an example of this. May’s dream entails her living underground, and coming up to experience “daylight and the sun... in a sudden dazzling moment”

(Frame 46) only to be disappointed because she had come up at night and is unable to comprehend the world above ground because “it seemed to go on and on without curtains as we know them or clay mountains, and there was no sign of a roof” (47). The world above, even in darkness is too alien and open for May to understand, with her knowledge of existence. Her intense loneliness at being above ground in the darkness makes her go back underground, where she deceives the

“shadowy presences” (47) there that she had seen the daylight was a “heaviness that will crush you to death” (47). The constant presence of shadows in the rest of the narrative is evidence of humanity’s failure to see a true reality. Instead we see only shadows upon which to construct our dreams. This wilful self-deception is evidence in Cronin’s view of a Platonic scheme, where the characters are unable to fully comprehend a better world beyond their own. Though this appears to be a largely pessimistic view of human improvement, the existence of shadows implies the existence of something more, and thus Frame does point towards a better world beyond our understanding that exists in some form or realm.

The discovery or, rather, recognition of this “place beyond” is proposed by both Patrick

Evans and Marc Delrez as being made possible by a new form of language referred to in Frame’s novels. Delrez’ study Manifold Utopia is entirely based on the utopian element of Frame’s fiction, and I will not attempt to summarise this here, but with reference to Intensive Care, when Delrez writes that “the distinctive quality of [Frame’s] fiction derives notably from her determination to use language as a vehicle of (un)consciousness, permeable to whatever may lie on the other side of accepted knowledge” (xv), he seems to be summing up the mode of writing of the key seer in

Intensive Care, Milly Galbraith. The probably autistic Milly is represented by her diary entries in the final section of the novel, where we see her unique form of language and its attempts to contain 123 the world around her. The (mis)spelling of words such as “chilldrin” (Frame 222) and “wonderfool”

(213) indicate more sinister meanings, not represented by conventional orthography and perception.

However her ironic phrasing of American as “Amerrykin” (212) indicates that she is not a seer for utopia, but rather a gestural figure towards this concept of non-alienated language. In his examination of Frame’s autobiographies, Evans suggests that Frame is seeking “the word that, in the end, will undo words, a language that will make language unnecessary – to stop talking, and to start listening and looking” (UW 81). Here we see a suggestion that an authentic interaction of the world comes in an immediate non-linguistic conception of experience, which means utopia cannot be imagined through the conventional construction and recollection of experience.

The emphasis on reversals of roles and processes witnessed in the texts of this chapter indicate an end point to the dominance of the tradition I am examining. Both Frame and Stead show how modernity, in the form of global capitalism is now unavoidable in New Zealand, challenging the notion of New Zealand uniqueness. Stead directly dismisses a metaphorical utopian resettlement witnessed in the failure of Smith’s island, which is in direct contrast to writers such as Hyde and

Mulgan who attempted to challenge the assumptions of their predecessors, but ultimately adopted the same methods for imagining utopia. Frame too challenges previous utopian ideals by suggesting that settlement is driven by permanent dissatisfaction, which does not change at the new site and always results in dangerous failure; the developments of modernity only serve to exaggerate these failures.

The attempts to define the colonial “other” are replaced by a fear of being made to feel

“other” by American invaders. The process of settlement can be seen to be finished in both of these texts, as a fear of Pākehā displacement would indicate indigenisation. Aspects of the settler tradition remain however, in that neither Stead nor Frame attempt to challenge notions of Māori representation. The focus is always on the effect of displacement on Pākehā nationalism. This 124 continues the process of indigenous marginalisation found in all of the preceding texts, and focuses national concerns on the Pākehā majority. However the challenging of utopian paradigms allows for space to be opened up to new responses and the chance for the dialectic’s scope to be widened. 125

Conclusion.

The meeting point between nationalism and utopianism in New Zealand settler literature can be seen to define the colonial period. The singular desires of the dominant British (mostly male) early settlers influenced national imagining until a loss confidence in utopianism as a concept removed the essential framework of Pākehā nationalism.Nationalist utopianism demonstrates its resilience up until the early 1970s, in its consistent reactions and redirections but ultimately ends as a primary mode of discourse when internal and external forces make this imagining problematic.

The relationship between nationalism and utopianism, based primarily on how utopianism functions as an extension of national imagining, is prominent in nearly all utopian texts. An examination of colonial literature in New Zealand reveals the great extent to which utopianism produces the framework for national definition. Individual authors engage with the history of settler idealism and update it according to their own context, always with one eye on modernity and its effect on human societies. This is why it is significant that the texts I have chosen show a sustained tradition that can be used to define the period of settler colonialism. Up until the post-war period, all of the texts that I have examined engage with previous utopian definitions of New Zealand and attempt to redefine the nation and its utopian directive according to their own historical context.

Though the utopian visions show variation, the key themes of exclusion and speculation remain consistent as utopianism justifies the displacement and oppression of the “other’s” disruptive narrative.

The chapters of my thesis demonstrate the extent to which this pattern recurs. My first chapter focuses on a period which can be seen as the advent of New Zealand utopian literature. This writing helped to justify and advertise the settlement plans of certain groups and to minimise the effects of other settlement plans and the disruptive presence of indigenous peoples. These texts begin to define the settler utopia as one belonging to a more restrictive category of nationalism that 126 places their authors’ own ideals and plans as central. The idea of a settler nationalist utopia also helped to entice emigrants by promising something better than their recently industrialised and uncertain home situation. JL Nicholas’ Narrative of Voyage to New Zealand from the early 19th century, and Adventure in New Zealand by EJ Wakefield from the mid 19th century demonstrate the attempt to “sell” New Zealand as a utopia. These texts demonstrate conflicts with each other and other groups, but maintain the process of defining New Zealand as a utopian nation.

This kind of writing carried on throughout the 19th century, and even after the population of

New Zealand grew and European settlement slowed down in terms of percentage growth, the tradition of imagining the nation as a place of utopian possibility remained. Samuel Butler’s

Erewhon however, interrupts this imagining by presenting an uncanny image of a nation beset by conflicting utopian ideals. The only way that Erewhon functions is through nationalism and the adherence to ideas of normative Erewhonian behaviour. This conformist behaviour allows for the various conflicts of capitalist, religious, scientific and preservationist utopianism to be retained in an unsettling inversion of utopian settlement. Julius Vogel’s Anno Domini 2000 published in 1889 demonstrates how it was still possible to imagine New Zealand as unique and able to be moulded into an exemplary nation. In its synthesis of elements of earlier works, Vogel’s text demonstrates the influence of utopian writing on contemporary texts.

This strength of tradition is particularly pronounced in some 1930s New Zealand literature.

Robin Hyde’s Wednesday’s Children and John Mulgan’s Man Alone constitute two different responses to the utopian tradition which are united in their suggestion that utopia had not yet been realised in New Zealand literature. Rather than reject the possibility of utopia after the devastating effect of the First World War, these texts refocus efforts to imagine a utopian nation outside of the bounds of previous nationalism and utopianism. Hyde defines the existing state of settlement as inauthentic and fundamentally unequal, marginalising all those who do not fit a certain category of nationalism, and thus excluding those groups who do not fit the ideals of a certain type of settler 127 utopianism. In this national vision’s place, she suggests an open and equal society for men and women, free from programmatic versions of nationalism that necessarily marginalise some groups.

Nevertheless, her version of a national utopia is still based on the metaphoric settlement of an island, signifying that New Zealand settlement was not complete, and that it still had the potential to be shaped into an ideal society.

John Mulgan’s Man Alone also imagines New Zealand as a failed utopia, but with the potential to be redirected into utopian nationalism. His version of original settlement depicts New

Zealand as a failed capitalist experiment, and suggests Marxism as key to national unity. However, this national unity is highly masculine, equating the natural world, femininity and Māori as a dangerous force that harms rather than aids the realisation of utopia. A conscious form of masculine identity and resilience is required to more accurately understand New Zealand’s environment that preceding settlement failed to achieve.

My final chapter demonstrates the way that this tradition was ended by the dominance of capitalism and changes in the modern era. Both texts attend to the idea that mainstream Pākehā nationalism could be subjugated by external forces and made to feel “other” as a result. Both these texts represent the incursion of modernity into New Zealand through the encroachment of American neo-imperialism.

C.K. Stead’s Smith’s Dream suggests that New Zealand was not an isolated utopian nation, but would in fact (as More’s Utopians do) have to engage with the larger historical context which encroached upon its shores. The global tension between capitalism and communism superseded previous literary attempts to isolate New Zealand from modernity. Capitalist utopianism is presented by Stead as being a constant mode of nationalism preceding this period, despite Mulgan’s attempt at redirection. This ideology combined with intense nationalist self-preservation lead Stead to imagine New Zealand falling victim to a totalitarian regime intent on protecting this nationalism.

The subsequently welcomed invasion of American forces by this regime enacts a symbolic split 128 from British colonialism and presents New Zealand as being caught between late capitalist domination and its earlier ideals of utopianism. Stead warns against attempting to permanently defend an imagined identity and instead suggests that utopia is not consciously possible to achieve, and that the acceptance of change and passing time is all that can be achieved.

Janet Frame’s Intensive Care also features an American interruption of New Zealand independence, this time following the catastrophic events of a nuclear war. However, Frame makes more explicit than Stead or Hyde how nationalism and utopianism combine to reinforce a cyclically destructive behaviour that Frame posits as universal to humanity. Rather than suggesting a redirection of utopian energy, she, like Stead suggests that utopia cannot be consciously found. The ideas of settlement and material utopianism, apparent in earlier texts, are replaced by the idea that utopia cannot be understood with the tools currently available to humanity. Nationalism speeds up cyclical destruction, but dangerous dreamworlds will continue to plague humanity until something beyond can be witnessed. Stead and Frame both present a critical utopian vision in order to show how the values of previous utopian modes inevitably lead towards the subjugation of certain groups.

Their utopian proposals are vague in themselves, tending towards an attempt to rediscover “nature,” indicating a loss of confidence and certainty in the colonial utopian project.

The end of the colonial period can thus be defined by the end of Pākehā nationalist utopianism, and the emergence of the disparate, previously buried narratives of other cultures.

Though this is not necessarily a cause-and-effect relationship, it is a correlative event that signifies a number of complex global occurrences. Patrick Evans writes that modernity as an era was in a state of change by the late sixties, and that

the changes that began to be felt in New Zealand around 1970 can be seen as minor late ones

– expressing, nevertheless, the same energies that would bring down the Berlin Wall and the 129

Soviet Union a couple of decades later and effect what the American historian Francis

Fukuyama famously argued, in 1989, was the ‘End of History’. (Forgetting 16)

This “End of History”, though incredibly contentious, is signalled in part by the dominance of global capitalist modernity, potentially ending the grand narrative of the utopianism that it is at odds with. New Zealand, as a nation defined by this narrative, thus loses its framework for national imagining. To quote Jameson on the emergence of the postmodern, the result of this change produced narratives which were “empirical, chaotic and heterogenous” (Postmodernism 1); the effect on utopianism was the emergence of a “range of micropolitical movements” (160). Other groups living in New Zealand who were excluded by older national imagining were now expressing their ideas of identity in the space that opened up, representing this heterogenous, micropolitical climate. Mark Williams describes the post-colonial divergence of New Zealand nationalism into three distinct nationalisms: “post-settler Pākehā nationalism, Māori nationalism, and bicultural nationalism” (Williams 21).

Pākehā nationalism begins to demonstrate a reflexive approach, investigating the history of settlement and rewriting the dominant mode. Texts such as Oracles and Miracles (1987) by Stevan

Eldred-Grigg and Symmes Hole (1986) by Ian Wedde feature different attempts to revisit aspects of

Pākehā history to challenge existing narratives of cultural development. This revision allows for new histories and identities to emerge which do not rely on the marginalising utopian processes of prior national formation.

Māori texts such as Ihimaera’s The Matriarch raise issues of racial antagonism, shown in the desire of the titular character for Māori to “turn your knowledge into his [Pākehā] destruction”

(Ihimaera 427). This form of nationalism suggests that is not only external but internal forces that intend to displace Pākehā nationalism. 130

Biculturalism and its internal divergence of direction also poses a challenge to utopianism.

Multiple internal cultures would disrupt the historical homogeneity of utopian thought, and present perhaps irreconcilable conflicts that would make utopia difficult to realise. Robert Sullivan’s epic poem Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002) examines a destructive side of the great canonised figure of Cook, but ends with an attempt to reconcile disparate cultures into a unified tradition able to search again for utopia:

And now I pluck a line of poets turned in unison

to the sun

following the warmth of unseen rays until they splay

on vowels with colours. Homer Curnow Dante

Rimbaud Tuwhare Baxter – Maui and Orphic Blood.

The line of poets “turned in unison” would seem an attempt to build a unified tradition that contains and allows difference. The sun and “the warmth of unseen rays” are a metaphor for betterment that revisits the darkness and light metaphors of Nicholas’ civilising project, as well as the universal

’pole star’ that Claeys proposes as being the root of utopian desire.

Added to Williams’ categories, I would suggest the cultural narratives of non-European immigrants also contribute to the divergence of the late Twentieth Century. Albert Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home (1973) explores ideas of utopian settlement from a Samoan immigrant family’s point of view and exposes the marginalisation and racism that Pākehā nationalism imposed on other groups. Wendt’s 1992 novel Black Rainbow is a more formally dystopian text which criticises the hybridisation and commodification of national identity and individual cultures in a future New

Zealand controlled by a capitalist dictatorship. Wendt’s approach problematises bicultural 131 utopianism, perhaps signifying the emergence of a new critical dialectic of bicultural utopianism alongside of settler idealism.

Despite statements such as those of Francis Fukuyama, utopia is still imagined, and still utilised in New Zealand nationalism. The demise of the “Better Britain” tag only gave way to terms such as “Godzone” for describing New Zealand. Similarly, advertising campaigns such as the controversial “100% Pure” campaign continue to utilise ideas of unique utopianism to encourage tourism in the country. This campaign’s use of Māori imagery would signal the continued presence of “Maoriland” tropes, equating indigenous figures with the landscape, thus continuing older themes of colonialism. The bicultural project still has some way to go to eliminate this form of tokenism in New Zealand national identity and utopian imagining. However, the period when New

Zealand literature was a reflection of unashamed settler dominance is now perhaps over, despite some lingering motifs.

There is now space at least for the imagining of new possibilities. The awareness that utopian nationalism marginalises and excludes based on subjective assumptions does not mean the end of this mode of writing. Awareness should at least, however, instigate a critical utopian tradition that attempts to understand the legacy of settler utopianism. The emergence of a multicultural utopian dialectic signifies postcolonialism, and perhaps an attempt at postcolonial utopian nationalism. This may be an impossible task, but that is why utopia exists, because it demands the reconciliation of ideals and forces us to examine the problems of the here and now. 132

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